AMA reporting needs a second opinion | Media Matters for America

AMA reporting needs a second opinion Media Matters for America

AMA reporting needs a second opinion
June 12, 2009 11:58 am ET
Thursday's New York Times article about the American Medical Association's opposition to the inclusion of a strong public option in health care reform had several serious flaws. As a result, it greatly overstated the significance of the AMA's stance and left out key information that undermines the group's claims.
The most basic flaw in the Times article is that it never made clear who the AMA represents. The article's headline described the AMA as a "Doctors' group." The second paragraph said it "is America's largest physician organization," with "about 250,000 members." The eighth paragraph said the AMA "probably has more influence than any other group in the health care industry." And the 13th described the AMA as "an umbrella group for 180 medical societies" before finally acknowledging it "does not speak for all doctors."
In fact, the AMA speaks for less than one-third of doctors. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 800,000 physicians practicing in America today, so the AMA's 250,000 members constitute only about 30 percent of all doctors.
Are the views of AMA members representative of the views of all physicians? The Times didn't even begin to address that question. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder reported that "the AMA's members tend to be more skeptical" of comprehensive health care reform "than the average doc." Matthew Holt of the widely respected Health Care Blog said the AMA "in general over-represents specialists and those in small practices." The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn added that the medical community does not "speak with the same unified, conservative voice it once did. ... Primary care physicians in partiuclar [sic] -- organized through groups like American Academy of Family Phyisicians [sic] and the American Pediatrics Association -- are generally more liberal and may well speak out in favor of the public plan, if they haven't already."
The Times' only indication that other doctors' groups might support a public option came in the 13th paragraph:
One group, Physicians for a National Health Program, supports a single-payer system of insurance, in which a single public agency would pay for health services, but most care would still be delivered by private doctors and hospitals. In recent years, some doctors have become so fed up with the administrative hassles of private insurance that they are looking for alternatives.
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, however, noted that there are others:
Take the National Physicians Alliance. It's a newer, smaller, younger association of doctors. It sees the interests of doctors as inseparable from the interests of patients. It supports a public plan. Or check out Physicians for a National Health Care Plan, which see the interests of doctors as irreconcilable with the interests of insurers. It's for single-payer.
Indeed, National Physicians Alliance policy chair Chris McCoy blasted the AMA's opposition to a public plan and renounced his membership in the AMA. That suggests the AMA may not speak for its own members, much less all doctors.
McCoy's open letter to the AMA brings up another way the New York Times article failed to give readers the proper context. The article made no attempt to assess the incentives the AMA might have to oppose a public plan, or to explain where the interests of doctors might diverge from the interests of patients and of the uninsured (or, for that matter, where their interests might overlap.) More at the link above...