Joe Conason: The AMA’s Unhealthy Obsession

from Truthdig:



The AMA’s Unhealthy Obsession

Posted on Jun 17, 2009
By Joe Conason


Campaigning to build the widest possible consensus for reform of the nation’s health care system, Barack Obama told the delegates of the American Medical Association that he wants their support, too. Persuasive and always polite, the president did not mention the embarrassing truth about his hosts—namely, that the AMA has undermined universal care with mindless zeal for more than 70 years.

The real question is not what the AMA will support or whether the attitudes of the AMA have changed, but why anyone would still heed its policy prescriptions. Very few national organizations have been so wrong for so long about the matters most salient to their own members.

The AMA’s sad history dates back to the Depression of the 1930s, when progressive doctors sought to organize themselves into the first health cooperatives, or health maintenance organizations, so that they could provide care to working families under a group plan. Seeing a threat to its own power, the AMA, in a blatant antitrust violation, prohibited members from working for those early health maintenance organizations.

During the decades that followed, the AMA dedicated millions of dollars to stopping universal health care in the United States, even as other developed nations were establishing a variety of successful systems that covered every citizen while holding down costs. This was an obsession that the organization shared with political forces on the far right. When President Harry Truman proposed a national health plan in 1948, the AMA unleashed a Red-baiting fury.

In the book “The Culture of the Cold War,” Stephen J. Whitfield recalls how the AMA vowed to “resist the enslavement of the medical profession,” warning that Truman was attempting to impose “a monstrosity of Bolshevik bureaucracy” on America. In pamphlets issued to fight the Truman plan, AMA publicists included a phony quote from Lenin proclaiming “socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.” The same pamphlets smeared supporters of Truman’s “compulsory health insurance” plan by connecting them to the Communist Party. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090617_the_amas_unhealthy_obsession/