The AMA responds

After reviewing both the Op Ed and the AMA response, I can only conclude that they are both right. The AMA, impotent in the fight against the Government and the Managed Care Industry, now takes on Wal-Mart. Anyone want to bet who the winner will be?

One thing that the drug store clinic idea shows is that there is no longer the slightest shred of shame or social penalty associated with hypocrisy. The phamacy industry has waged a 150 year war on physician office dispensing on the grounds that it presents a conflict of interest–even though in all but unusual situations it is scarcely any profit to the physician that is a meaningful percentage of his fee-based income. Now pharmacies are jumping into providing medical care which presents a HUGE conflict of interest–especially when they have midlevel practioners as employees. Anyone who doesn’t thing they are going to be expected to prescribe in such a fashion as to optimize drug store profits is a dufus–and as semi-professional employees they are going to have no independence and are going to be expected to take orders like any other employee.

young physicians are especially unlikely to benefit from AMA membership. Dues are outrageous, publications are largely filled with pharma ads & social garbage rather than medicine, and AMA leaders are rarely connected to the actual issues facing practicing doctors.

This is true of state medical societies also.

I recently received an email asking for dues (i DID join the ACP but will not renew), and I responded “are due discounted for primary care docs, like insurance reimbursements?”

The response was a humorless mechanical “no, dues are the same for everyone at your stage of career, blah blah blah”. So even their dues-collecting monkeys can’t be bothered to listen to those they claim to represent.

They need to just be disbanded, and I foresee that in the next 20yrs as this generation of doctors sees through this bs, that is what will happen.