What Does the AMA Have Against Health Care?

The American Medical Association has come out against government-sponsored insurance plan. This should not surprise us. As Ezra Klein points out in the Washington Post, the AMA has fought every public health care plan proposed by every President since Harry Truman.

Why? As Ezra says, reforms that would make health care less expensive would also cut doctors’ revenues.

We need to understand that the AMA is not the benevolent protector of sound medical practice it makes itself out to be. Its primary function is to protect the profit margins of the health care industry. And for this reason, for years it has joined forces with the Right to push for “tort reform.”

The AMA and the American Council of Engineering Companies are co-founders of the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which has turned into an umbrella group of special interests and astroturf organizations pushing for tort reform legislation. The ties of “tort reform” to the Right, via Karl Rove, are legendary.

Take, for example, the organization Citizens for Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), which has chapters in several states actively pushing “tort reform” to state legislatures. According to SourceWatch, CALA is an astroturf organization commissioned by the Philip Morris tobacco company in 1995, and Philip Morris continues to fund and direct CALA through ATRA. SourceWatch says,

“A ‘privileged and confidential’ Philip Morris (PM) tort reform budget from 1995shows that PM spent over $16 million to instigate tort reform during that year alone, and that PM paid an international public relations firm called APCO & Associates (now known as APCO Worldwide) almost $1 million in 1995 to implement tort reform efforts behind the scenes.”

ATRA promotes CALA on its website (scroll to bottom) as

“… citizen activists fed up with the high cost and injustice in our legal system. They work actively within their communities to urge individual responsibility, safety, and to chronicle abuses of the legal system and to fight for civil justice reform.”

Yeah, right.

It is ironic that the AMA, which 20 years ago stood up to the tobacco industry by calling for a ban on tobacco ads, is now in bed with it. They’re shacked up in a shabby off-the interstate motel hoping no one finds them, but they’re in bed just the same.

Why Watch Out for “Tort Reform”?

Health care reform and the preservation of 7th Amendment rights are both issues critical to people suffering asbestos-related diseases, such as mesothelioma. But as we engage in the fight with special interests and extreme conservatism to reform health care, it’s important for all of us to understand exactly what special interest groups like the AMA are trying to protect.

Clue: It’s not health care.

CALA and other organizations funded by special interests are going from state to state, seducing state legislators into passing “tort reform” laws that make filing personal injury lawsuits more burdensome and cap jury awards to plaintiffs. Legislators are promised that these “reforms” will reduce health care costs, stimulate the economy and even create more jobs. At this point, more than half of the states have enacted “tort reform” measures.

The results? First, in not a single “tort reform” state has health care cost been reduced. Texas often is held up as the tort reform success model, but health care costs in Texas actually have been rising faster than in most of the rest of the country.

And as I write in “The Tort Number Crunch,” studies that claim to show tort reform enabling economic growth are highly misleading. Essentially, state legislators are trading away citizens’ 7^th Amendment Rights for nothing.

The question we have to ask the AMA and others fighting to protect the old system is, what is the purpose of a health care system? Is it to provide health care, or is it to maximize the profits of a private health care system?

June 11, 2009
Barbara O’Brien

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