The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors' own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.
It also calls into question whether an overhaul is even doable; 72% of the doctors polled disagree with the administration's claim that the government can cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.
• Four of nine doctors, or 45%, said they "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passes the plan the Democratic majority and White House have in mind.
More than 800,000 doctors were practicing in 2006, the government says. Projecting the poll's finding onto that population, 360,000 doctors would consider quitting.
Like AARP, the AMA deserves to lose a lot of members over this. I wish they would both go broke.
This is war and one battle that could help us is if we started to boycott doctors that are members of the AMA.
I don’t recall where but I believe the percentage of Doctors who are members was around 17%. Doctors make the decision to join the group and therefore should be held responsible for the groups actions.
By instituting a boycott of AMA member doctors, we force them to make a choice, the AMA or their patients, they can’t have both.
Do these people really believe that doctors’ salaries, work hours, and ability to practice medicine will not be dramatically and adversely affected by this socialist power grab? Once again the AMA “leadership”, as is the case with other representative bureaucracies (i.e. union “leaders”, etc.) sell their members down the river, while they continue to live off the annual dues paid to protect those interests.
In my humble opinion, any doctor stupid enough to be a member of the AMA after yesterday's announcement, is too stupid to be allowed to practice medicine.
There’s always room for more left wing, K Street bs. It’s no surprise that Al-Jazeera is also headquartered there.
The underlying problem is that most of the AMA's revenue depends not on membership dues or the like, but on a copyright AMA holds for medical procedure and services codes that must be used for all Medicare billing and most private insurance billing by medical providers. Thus, a medical practice which accepts Medicare and private insurance patients is forced by the AMA's monopoly to purchase coding info from the AMA, and AMA is glad to charge a hefty non-competitive price. Plus, AMA is sure to update their coding info every so often, which nets them additional revenues every time they choose to do so. The AMA's government-granted monopoly has been challenged in court, but with little success.
Let's hope that the AMA House of Delegates has the courage and integrity to overrule the government collaborators whom they employ to run the organization, and who think they speak for the organization and for American physicians as a group, when in fact they speak for only a few.