by Deb Cupples | Today's New York Times reports:
"While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be 'provided through private markets, as they are currently.'”
First, notice how the AMA's two notions logically conflict: 1) that the AMA's goal is affordable health care, and 2) that the AMA wants to promote private health-care markets.
Apparently, the AMA's powers that be aren't aware of this crucial fact: our nation's health care costs have skyrocketed while largely controlled by "private market" players.
Also note that the AMA's powers that be are falling back on corporate-GOP talking points about "private markets," which is odd given that so-called "free market" (i.e., anti-accountability) ideology was severely discredited last year when our nation's entire banking system started collapsing.
Fortunately, when you get down to the twelfth paragraph of the Times article, you see that not all doctors agree with the AMA's powers that be.
In fact, 14,000 doctors from a group called Physicians for a National Health Program disagree with the AMA's powers that be. Here's a piece of what one doctor-member of PNHP said:
"The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita. Yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 45.7 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.
"The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay." (PNHP)
Incidentally, poor healthcare quality really is an issue -- especially given how much we Americans spend on healthcare. In September 2007, the Washington Post ran an article that included this paragraph:
"Each year, an estimated 1.7 million hospital patients develop infections, each of which adds thousands of dollars to the cost of treatment. And some patients pay the highest price: Hospital infections kill approximately 99,000 Americans a year."
Death by hospital was not a new issue in 2007. In 2002, the Chicago Tribune ran a piece that contained these chilling paragraphs:
"A hidden epidemic of life-threatening infections is contaminating
America's hospitals, needlessly killing tens of thousands of patients
each year.
These infections often are characterized by the health-care industry as
random and inevitable byproducts of lifesaving care. But a Tribune
investigation found that in 2000, nearly three-quarters of the deadly
infections--or about 75,000--were preventable, the result of unsanitary
facilities, germ-laden instruments, unwashed hands and other lapses....
[Dr. Barry Farr, who was president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, told the Tribune: ]
"‘The number of people needlessly killed by hospital infections is unbelievable, but the public doesn't know anything about it . . . . For years, we've just been quietly bundling the bodies of patients off to the morgue while infection rates get higher and higher.’"
This begs the question: why would any hospital slack off on sanitation? It may have something to do with a trend among hospital chains to maximize profits by cutting staff -- which certainly casts doubt on the "free market" notion that profit-motive promotes better service.
Ironically, the AMA's powers that be have spent tons of resources trying to get caps put on damage awards for people whose loved ones died due to negligent (i.e., low quality) health care.
All said, I can't help but smell a cash-grab as the real motive behind the AMA's stance on public health care.
The AMA has far more members than the PNHP, but not all members necessarily agree with the AMA's powers that be.
Still, 14,000 is a large number of doctors -- too large (and too highly educated) a group to be dismissed as fringe folks or crackpots.
As Marc Ambinder points out:
"[P]lenty of other doctor's groups [i.e., not the AMA] have reason to support public plans, particularly non-specialists and many specialist-generalists (i.e., oncologists who treat a range of cancer).
Memeorandum has commentary.
Other Buck Naked Politics Posts:
* Death by Hospital (infection)
* Contractor Fraud: Driving Up Healthcare Costs?
* Pharma-Paid Doctors Wrote Risky Scrips for Kids
* Insurance Companies Get Away with Over-billing Medicare
* Drug Companies Scammed Taxpayers, Cancer Patients, Others
* FDA's Latest Pharma-Friendly Sins
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