2:12 PM
From the
President
BRUCE A. SCOTT, MD
GLMS President | [email protected]
BECOME PART OF THE SCRIPT
A
s the holiday season approaches,
I’ve been inspired by the great
Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. You’re all familiar with the plot.
Basically, an angel named Clarence comes
down from heaven to show George Bailey
what the world would be like if he had never
lived—for George is having a difficult time
finding value in his life. With apologies to
Jimmy Stewart, I am reworking the script,
casting the American Medical Association
center stage, and looking for a minute at
what health care and our medical profession
would be like if the AMA had never existed.
Let’s think about medical education.
Would schools still be training medical students without formal accreditation? Might
a standard curriculum not exist? We must
not forget that it was the AMA in the mid1800s that formalized medical education
standards and continues to support accreditation to this day.
What about medical ethics? The AMA
developed the Code of Medical Ethics in
1847, and it continues to be updated and
adapted for our profession.
What about in the area of public health?
Would Joe Camel still be smiling down from
his billboard perch menacing our children,
while the tobacco companies counted their
profits with glee?
Now I know what you’re thinking. Stop
the movie, Bruce. You’re one of us. Every
day we face the hassles of managed care,
decreasing reimbursement, and increasing
demands upon our time. These things happened many years ago, and they would have
happened whether I was an AMA member
or not.
Across society, the rallying cry has become “What have you done for me lately?”
That is a challenge I’m willing to answer,
because I am in the trenches fighting those
same daily battles with you.
This last year alone, the AMA achieved
more than 85 state legislative and regulatory victories in collaboration with state and
specialty medical societies including advocating for physician interests in state-based
health system reform, pursuing medical
liability reform, postponing the SGR each
year which saved physicians untold amounts
of money and continuing to fight ICD-10
implementation among many others. The
AMA is calling for a design overhaul of
EHRs to improve usability. It is also working
with 112 national medical societies to review and correct the data posted by medical
device and drug manufacturers required by
the Sunshine Act.
Academic physicians, medical students,
and all past students may be interested to
learn that the AMA Foundation has given
over $60 million over the last fifty years, including over $11 million this year to medical
schools, including University of Louisville,
for scholarships, medical education and research. Not to mention over $40 million for
public health activities including physician
and student run charity clinics.
They’ve reinvented how they engage physicians and medical students through AMA
Morning Rounds and the AMA Wire. These
services are reliable, evolving destinations
for new developments that impact the medical community.
This is not your father’s AMA—this is a
much more aggressive AMA that is bringing
home value every day to your practice and
who stands up to the managed care lobby
in Congress to fight for physicians and our
patients.
Some might argue that we don’t need the
AMA because the specialty societies can
handle the job. In reality, when our specialty
societies go to Washington, DC, they are
becoming, as one congressman told me,
simply a “loudest squeaking mouse contest.” None of them will ever have the voice
to compete with the roar of the insurance
industry and its highly organized lobby.
Each specialty society fighting for their own
special interests, sometimes in competition with other physician lobbies, provides
a mixed message at best.
Unfortunately, too many physicians quit
the AMA over a single issue. They agree with
much that the AMA has done, but because
of a single issue