President Obama is expected to address the American Medical Association next week in Chicago, but before he has a chance to, the powerful doctors’ lobbyist group with some 250,000 members already came out and said it opposes a government-funded healthcare plan. Why? They say they’re worried about you, the taxpayer.
Without private insurers, the group says via the Times, “the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.” But as the Huffington Post reports, the AMA has a seven-decade history of opposing pretty much every healthcare reform effort under the sun.
Like I said a couple days ago, a transformation of our current healthcare mess will affect patients, doctors, and hospitals alike. Many doctors aren’t excited by the idea of becoming government employees—or rather, they’re not excited by getting paid like a government employee. After dropping a couple hundred thousand bucks on their educations, they understandably need to be paid better than somebody at the DMV.
But is this really about money? Or control? Something else? The only reason anything’s happening at all is because health costs are out of control in the first place. Can they really get much worse? (I guess things can always get worse.) I have to think that the AMA has announced its opposition merely as a start to the negotiation process. They want to be calling some of the shots in whatever plan becomes reality. And if nothing happens? Doctors, as you may have noticed, are doing pretty well for themselves as is. As for the 45 million uninsured in America, apparently that’s not their problem. No wonder so many more people are turning to the web nowadays for medical advice.
