So what? Maybe someday intelligent minds will note that there are careers that pay better than medicine and law without all the costs and sacrificed income in training, with less litigation, and without onerous call. In other countries, such better careers might include taxi driver. Don't look for the insurance companies to pay you a seven figure salary for being a great doctor, quite the contrary.

Any big money made by a plastic surgeon doing boobs and butts is NOT federal or insurance money, it is the free marketwhere people spend their money as they wish. Doctors do not compete in a free market otherwise.

Are you saying that there are TOO FEW plastic surgeons/dermatologists/ENT's and even some FP's accepting the discretionary nonfederal, noninsurance dollars of the vain and the AMA is to blame? Why do you think the market for self-pay procedures is growing? My background is in economics, and in this case at least, this is a free market. There are cases of nonmedical practitioners who injected silcone in butts causing resulting in lethal consequences, just like the back-alley abortionist. That is not a free market issue, it is manslaughter.

I'm sure the physicians who spend MANY uncompensated hours leading the AMA would LOVE to have as much power as the uninformed attribute to them....

(And yes, of COURSE the president, etc., are paid a salary - but delegates and other physicians who lend MANY hours of their increasingly limited time to try to improve the practice of medicine in America do so at their own expense....)

The AMA doesn't control America's medical schools - they have their own professional organization and make their OWN decisions about how many students to train. And if anyone thinks they can simply accept twice as many students, without additional state and federal funding (not to mention additional teachers, cadavers, etc.....) then they're not thinking it though....