PA Bill Number: HB2311
Title: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program.
Description: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program. ...
Last Action: Laid on the table
Last Action Date: Sep 23, 2024
DRGO: The AMA, Ethics and Gun Control :: 07/03/2016
The AMA is joining the gun prohibition movement in full force. Led by the long-time speaker of the AMA’s House of Delegates, now president-elect, organized medicine has joined the gun control movement full steam ahead. Its new leader, Richard F. Corlin, M.D., will call for the AMA to increase funding to “study data on firearms injuries” at its June 20 annual meeting.(1)
The fact is that the public health establishment, incarnated in the CDC, other government agencies and the myriad of schools of public health, has been sponsoring and conducting “gun research” for nearly two decades that has been found to be biased, result-oriented, and based on what has been characterized by a number of serious investigators as junk science.(2)
The AMA, using its publication empire, has been publishing this “research” in its journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Essentially only those researchers who embraced the politically correct, preordained conclusions that “easy gun availability results in crime” and that “guns and bullets are pathogens that must be eradicated” were published. Contrary views have been censored.
The monolithic wall of censorship was only breached by the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG) while I was editor from 1993-1995. I recounted the story of my travails in a chapter entitled “Censorship and Editorial Lynching in the Deep South” in my book, Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (1997).
The wall cracked further with the advent of the Medical Sentinel, which was the official, peer-reviewed journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. So I am intimately knowledgeable about this subject from personal experience and 10 years of research into this subject.(3)
In the spring of 1996, Drs. Timothy Wheeler (Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership), William Waters IV (Doctors for Integrity in Policy Research), myself (as editor of the then newly founded Medical Sentinel), and the legal scholar Don B. Kates testified before a congressional subcommittee about this biased, result-oriented research conducted by the CDC and its politicized branch, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), and as a result the latter entity was ordered by Congress not to conduct tainted gun control research at taxpayers’ expense.(4)
The story about how that episode came about was published in the Medical Sentinel in my four-part article (Spring and Summer 1997) entitled “The Perversion of Science and Medicine”.(5)
I can testify that the AMA has been moving steadily to the left in a variety of issues, from the perversion of medical ethics to gun control.(6) Yet it has not always been that way. In Medical Warrior I also described how, over the years, the AMA tried to please everyone but has ended up pleasing no one! The AMA has tried to be all things to all people, pragmatic at all costs, whether in discussion of socioeconomic policies or medical ethics.(7)
I have been told, by at least one AMA defender, “It’s just politics.” That may be, but when dealing with ethics and constitutional issues, principles should not be compromised by playing politics. There is simply too much at stake!
But now the AMA is moving definitely to the left. No wonder President George W. Bush refused to deliver the traditional first health care address to the AMA. Nevertheless, while AMA membership remains low, its coffers remain full. The AMA has plenty of money to fund gun control efforts and ingratiate itself with the establishment’s media and the liberal left camp, which lately it has joined. Indeed, the AMA’s finances are said to be in the best shape that they have been in over 15 years, despite dwindling membership and questionable relevance to health care policy and medical affairs.
In the March/April 1998 issue of the Medical Sentinel, we reported that in 1996, three AMA officers were paid more than $200,000 for their time “playing politics” within organized medicine. AMA reimbursement figures then, according to Physicians Weekly, were:
AMA Officers Position held in 1996 & Reimbursement Figures:
Dr. Nancy Dickey Chairman $258,790
Dr. Lonnie Bristow Immediate Past Pres. $229,540
Dr. Daniel Johnson Jr. President $221,970
Dr. Percy Wootton President-elect $168,720
Dr. Thomas Reardon Vice-Chairman $147,929
Dr. Robert McAfee* Immediate Past President $135,440
Dr. Yank Coble Jr. Trustee $105,915
Dr. Randolph Smoak Jr. Secretary-Treasurer $99,087
Dr. Regina Benjamin Trustee $91,716
Dr. Timothy Flaherty Trustee $90,792
Dr. John Nelson Trustee $90,405
Dr. Donald Lewers Trustee $87,521
Dr. Richard Corlin Speaker $85,875
Dr. William Jacott Trustee $82,369
Dr. Palma Formica Trustee $75,492
*Term ended in June 1996
Source: Physicians Weekly (07/21/97)
There is no reason to suppose that since that time those reimbursement figures have not increased, along with the AMA’s operating budget, which was $200 million in 1998 and has risen to $247 million today.
In fact, AMA finances have been so good and its coffers so full that in 1997, Dr. Randolph Smoak Jr., who was then AMA secretary-treasurer and who is now the president, reported that every revenue category had increased except for membership dues. Furthermore, Smoak noted, “This good news should continue to keep the AMA relevant for the physicians of 1997 and the future. Indeed, the AMA is projected to receive an $8.2 million gain in real estate sales. And will end 1997 with $5.9 million in the black … and robust reserve levels that should exceed $148 million in 1999.”(8)
These predictions, for the most part, materialized. As a result, rumors circulated that the AMA no longer needed members to remain financially afloat. The rumors were confirmed by the Chicago Tribune, which reported in the fall of 1997 in the midst of the AMA-Sunbeam scandal that over 70 percent of the AMA’s revenues “came from sources other than membership — including real estate and the publication of coding books, which are revised annually and required for physician compliance with government rules and regulations.”(8) [Emphasis added.]
Despite an embarrassingly low membership at 32 percent of American physicians, the AMA claims to represent all physicians and the medical profession. And make no mistake about it, the AMA may not have the membership numbers, but it has ample finances to fund gun control efforts and other leftward leaning projects.
What is the source of this wealth? It’s the AMA’s publication empire, which rests solidly on a monopolistic pact with the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), a secret agreement that was brought to light in an article by AAPS General Counsel Andrew L. Schlafly in the Summer 1998 issue of the Medical Sentinel.(9) The AMA leadership even refused to show those documents to the rank-and-file membership. But the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), not so easily thwarted, obtained the documents from a source independent from the AMA and HCFA.
Schlafly revealed that under provisions of this pact, the AMA was given a monopoly over the government-imposed coding standards for physicians. By contractual obligation, HCFA must enforce the coding systems developed by the AMA upon the same physicians the AMA purportedly serves and represents. This contract has been in effect since 1983 when AMA Executive Vice President James H. Sammons, M.D., signed the agreement. The AMA continues to impose these money-making but onerous coding regulations on physicians in the name of HCFA.
Who pays for this government-granted AMA monopoly and regulatory burden? Ultimately, the patient does. Year after year, American physicians must purchase the new coding books in order to bill the government and third-party insurance carriers for medical services rendered to patients. Codes must be current, and physicians must not make billing errors. Coding errors may result in the government accusation of fraud and abuse, prosecution, and jail time.
Schlafly is indeed correct when he asserts: “Virtually every crime has a motive, and the motive here is money. Lots of it. The AMA declares on its website that the AMA ‘generates approximately two-thirds of its annual $200 million operating budget from non-dues sources.’ Of that $133 million in non-dues revenue, the AMA’s publication revenue, including sales of those expensive CPT code books, is its most prominent source. The victims of these endlessly complicated revisions to coding are physicians rendering private medical care. Each year physicians pay substantial costs and expend precious hours trying to keep up with the rules imposed by the AMA’s CPT moneymaking machine. The time and money lost by physicians due to the AMA could be far better spent in the service of patients.”(9) Amen!
In a subsequent part of this essay (Part II), we will discuss other topics which confirm the AMA is moving leftward in the political spectrum, whether it is medical journalism, ethics, unionization, the corporate practice of medicine, etc.
Part II
I was struck one particular morning when I heard on the radio on January 15, 1999, that the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), George D. Lundberg, M.D., had been fired by the AMA for using JAMA for his own political purposes. The chickens had come home to roost, I thought.
JAMA and Medical Journalism
In 1991 when the AMA launched a major campaign against domestic violence, I joined in this campaign as a member of organized medicine, although admittedly, with significant skepticism. What I found over the next four years, particularly after I became editor of the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (JMAG) was that instead of providing a balanced and honest approach to socioeconomic and political issues based on facts and scientific data, as would be required by professional, objective medical journals, JAMA and other AMA literature, echoed the emotionalism, rhetoric, and political correctness (and particularly so with fashionable and trendy issues) championed by the mass media.(1) This was particularly dishonest because physicians, policy makers, and the general public place a great deal of trust and credibility in the AMA, its press releases, and the studies it sponsors and publishes.
I found that despite the expressed sentiments and wishes of the rank-and-file, dues-paying members of the AMA, the vast majority of physicians who wanted to preserve the individual-based ethics and medical tradition inherent to the Oath of Hippocrates, AMA leaders prodded by medical journal editors were spearheading efforts in health care reform in the opposite direction, towards population-based ethics and the step-by-step socialization of American medicine.(2)
There is no question that Dr. Lundberg had a great deal to do with all that. He had been editor of JAMA for 17 years, and he had hoped to break the record set by his great predecessor Morris Fishbein, M.D., the prolific, outspoken, long-time editor of JAMA (from 1924 to 1949), who had himself been ousted because he had “outshined” the AMA leadership, and the Board of Trustees came to resent his influence.(3) Now, it was Dr. Lundbergs turn, although, he had been promoted by the AMA to be in charge of Scientific Information and Multimedia. (He now heads Medscape, an internet website for marketing health care products and services.)
After the 1999 coup, at a press conference, AMA Vice President Ratcliffe Anderson, M.D. said that Dr. Lundberg “inappropriately and inexcusably had interjected JAMA into a major political debate that had nothing to do with science and medicine.”
Supposedly, the AMA leadership was “outraged” because he had published an article that concluded from a survey of college students that oral sex did not constitute “having sex.” The study had been expedited for publication over other articles to coincide with the “scientific” whitewashing of the oral sex allegations involving President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Political expediency and social embarrassment – about kinky sex and lies, perjury, and the appearance of JAMA and the AMA closing ranks behind a disgraced president – forced the AMA leadership to do what principles and militant ideology had not: Fire Dr. Lundberg and attempt to get the house of JAMA in order!(2)
Yet the AMA was not faultless. In fact, the AMA leadership shared a great portion of the blame for the journalistic debacle. JAMAs mission statement under which Dr. Lundberg operated was approved by the AMA Board of Trustees which included in part: “To foster responsible and balanced debate on controversial issues”(3) “To inform readers about non-clinical aspects of medicine and public health,” including the political, environmental and cultural issues.
JAMAs statement of principles also included a blanket statement about “a social responsibility” to some greater societal purpose. One should question whether JAMA and the AMA then could really pick a bone of contention with Dr. Lundberg, when the organization itself bandied about such objectives and used such liberal left buzzwords as “social responsibility,” terms frequently abused and exploited for political purposes. Thus, the AMA leadership had set themselves up for the Lundberg fiasco, when they allowed politics to enter the picture masquerading as objective, scientific medical journalism. This fiasco now added another laundry item to the long list of AMA scandals, e.g., Sunbeam, CPT code monopoly, E&M guidelines, etc. which had been accumulating since the late 1990s.
The fact is that in the last two decades, the AMA had opened itself to denunciation for the overt politicization of science and medicine, both through the type of social and politically correct “research” it has sponsored, the public relations campaigns it funds (i.e., domestic violence, gun control, etc.) and the medical publications it publishes and disseminates.
Physician Unionization
When many physicians became dissatisfied with managed care, HMOs, and the increasing corporativism of American medicine – which organized medicine has supported in the last two decades – the AMA began to consider options to counteract the very problems it had helped to create, vis-à-vis the socialization of American medicine, by supporting physician unionization.
Yes, instead of returning to the individual-based ethics of Hippocrates and re-invigorating the profession by opposing head-on the real iniquities in todays medical care incarnated in managed care and HMOs and government intervention, organized medicine decided, instead, to patch the system here and there by clamoring for more government intervention – that is, when not passively going along with the flow, a flow that always seems to carry the organization in the leftward direction. Again and again, the AMA leadership forgets that medicine is a profession, a calling, and not a trade, thus agreeing to the formation of physician unions for collective bargaining, as is the case with the labor unions.
As I wrote in a special Labor Day article last year: “Under siege, discouraged and demoralized, many physicians see no way out and have turned to the formation of [doctor] unions. Many young physicians, particularly in California and Florida, have actually joined physician unions thinking it would protect them from the abuses of managed care and the exigencies of the corporate practice of medicine, telling themselves, “Lets fight fire with fire.” So they think…!”(4)
Indeed, as I wrote in the same article: “One of President Ronald Reagan’s most memorable actions early in his first term of office was the firing of striking air traffic controllers en masse for violating federal labor laws. His actions were loudly applauded throughout the land.
“Question: Did anyone feel sorry for the union members [then] making $40,000 a year or more, despite their high level of responsibility? Did anyone feel their pain? So, consider this: Who is going to feel sorry for striking American physicians making, for the most part, more than $75,000 a year and who, for years, the mass media have hammered as greedy and uncaring?
“Although managed care and HMOs have been hard on physician and patient autonomy, physicians experience its iniquities day in and day out and patients when they get sick or seriously ill. Frankly, physicians have been led (or rather, misled) by the leaders of organized medicine. These medical politicians caught up in the trappings of office have allowed the ethics of the profession to be transmogrified from the Oath and tradition of Hippocrates and individual-based ethics to the heavily government-regulated, collectivist corporate practice of medicine.”(4)
Physicians who have unionized, encouraged by the AMAs new leftward direction, not only have joined in solidarity with some of the most radical left movements in the political spectrum such as the labor unions and the National Education Association, but also have placed themselves in a great ethical dilemmas. Will these physicians set on this path eventually refuse to care for their patients, joining the strike and abandoning those with whom they have established a patient-doctor relationship? It goes without saying these actions would go against whatever remains of the grain of medicine, a sacred calling according to the tradition of Hippocrates.
What can physicians and other health care providers really do to combat managed care (corporate socialized medicine)?(5) Obviously, put patients first, like the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons’ (AAPS) motto – Omnia pro aegroto!
Suffice to say, the issue of whether physicians survive as professionals, practicing according to the tradition of Hippocrates and respected as independent practitioners, on the one hand, or become a government-controlled trade union, on the other, will likely be decided in our generation. The informed public then must watch the medical profession closely. Much more than politics is at stake, when the perversion of medical ethics is involved. Our health and our lives are at stake too!
References
1. AMA Joins Gun Grabbers. NewsMax.com, May 1, 2001.
2. Kates DB, Schaffer HE, Lattimer JK, Murray GB, Cassem EH. Guns and public health: epidemic of violence or pandemic of propaganda? Tennessee Law Review 1995;62:513-596; and Suter E. Guns in the medical literature — a failure of peer review. J Med Assoc Ga 1994;83(3):137-148.
3. Faria MA Jr. Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine. Macon, Georgia, Hacienda Publishing Inc., 1997, pp. 184-191.
5. Faria MA Jr. The perversion of science and medicine (Parts III-IV). Medical Sentinel 1997;2(2):46-53 and Medical Sentinel 1997;2(3):81-86.
6. Faria MA Jr. The transformation of medical ethics through time (Part II). Medical Sentinel 1998;3(2):53-56. See also reference #3 above.
7. Faria, MA. Medical Warrior, op. cit., pp. 142-146 and 164-169. 8. AMA reimbursement figures and Financially, to AMA, membership may be optional? News and Analysis. Medical Sentinel 1998;3(2):42.
9. Schlafly AL. AMAs secret pact with HCFA. Medical Sentinel 1998;3(4):149-150.
Additional reading:
11. Wheeler T. The AMA’s Long March for Gun Control. DRGO, August 25, 2015.
