The Obama administration is determined to bring health care costs down. That was a main theme of his speech to the AMA today. One of the main proposals to help accomplish this goal is the “public option”, a government run insurance plan that would compete with private plans thereby forcing prices down. Additional proposals include establishing best practices within the medical profession and basing reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals on whether these measures are implemented, as well as cracking down on unnecessary treatments and procedures.
Republicans are opposed to all of these cost-cutting measures, but then they complain that health care reform costs too much. I don’t think you can have it both ways.
It is also noteworthy that the American Medical Association is officially opposed to Obama’s public option. Here the logic is straightforward. Obama talks about reducing reimbursement rates, which would mean less money for some doctors. The doctors oppose the plan. No surprise there.
As Ben Stein explains:
Historically and philosophically, however, AMA’s opposition is hardly newsworthy. Despite a lofty reputation and purported commitment to universal coverage, AMA has fought almost every major effort at health care reform of the past 70 years. The group’s reputation on this matter is so notorious that historians pinpoint it with creating the ominous sounding phrase “socialized medicine” in the early decades of the 1900s.
Via The Wonk Room, It turns out that the AMA, which includes as member only a portion of the doctors in the U.S. is largely supported by Big Pharma, who is throwing big money into trying to defeat health care reform.
…over the course of at least a century the AMA has found that it can’t rely on membership dues to generate the kind of revenue that the AMA leadership is looking for. Instead, they’ve turned to corporate sponsorship—businesses with money to make by casting a veneer of medical respectability around their pursuit of profit find a relationship with the AMA to be useful.
[…] AMA derives at least a fifth of its budget from drug companies through an arrangement known as “licensure.” The program consists of AMA selling drug companies its “Masterfile” of doctor profiles, spanning everything from detailed biographic information to an individual doctor’s prescription-writing history. The program is extremely controversial since drug companies in turn use the information to aggressively market their products to doctors. Controversial drugs Vioxx and Avandia, which have subsequently been found to pose significant risks to patients, have been marketed to doctors, in some cases, using information obtained from the AMA.
So it is clear why the AMA is opposed to the public option. I am pleased that the AMA’s logic is better than that of the Republicans. I just wish they were a bit more concerned about their patients.
Tags: Health care reform, Health Care reform and the AMA, public option
