http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association
I can't believe no one who has criticized me of calling the AMA a union has bothered to look up their wiki page. Read the politics section and the criticisms section.
If you don't believe wiki, there are plenty of respected economists, health care researchers, and historians that have written about the AMA.
Read Paul Starr's Pulitzer prize winning book, "Social Transformation of American Medicine."
It's pretty easy to call me an idiot on a public internet forums. Call up Paul Starr and Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize Winner) and tell them they are idiots.
Maybe you should read Starrs book (which is maybe 30 years old) and now in the context of the corporitization of todays medicine. Castalino wrote a review of Starrs book "Physicians and Corporations: A corporate transformation of american medicine" i think that highlighted the issues he left unresolved for his times. This was in 2004 and in 9 short years her data on privatization to large corporate structures has shifted even further than Starrs time.
While I agree as in any economic relationship people on each side have self serving priorities, I take a person or group of people over a corporation. when the one side is a corporation governed soley by their bottom line profit margin (by law) then there is a total lack of societal obligation and the concern for another human being that all people have (except the occassional psyhopath) as a member of the human species. We are concerned when another person is sick or injured because survival of the fittest (species, not individual) dictates the survival of the human genome. We maybe more concerned with someone more closely related to us, but we all share 99.9% or whatever of the same genes so the survival of an unknown stranger will still allow 99.9% of our genome to survive. Thats why you see in other higher order species often raising the offspring of another adult that died. Or protecting a member of their species who is endangered by a predator. This maybe amounts to us as "morality" or a conscious but is even more fundamental before laws and religion.
This should be a comforting piece of knowledge, though it obviously does not hold 100% true and gets distorted in modern society. I'm not arguing for physicians or any particular reforms, but making the point you want people in charge of the well being of other people. This applies to societal structures like healthcare, fire department, agriculture and not a corporation or private interests who make decisions about another persons well being from a distance. its harder to make a self serving decision when you are face to face with another humans suffering, but it easier when you are looking at a screen of numbers that represent profit and morbidity/mortality.
Look at the ownership of hospitals in the US and the number of private for profit corporations, though even public nonprofit corporations are still corporations and profits just leave in another form besides money. Such as bond debt, using nonprofit assets and capital to support a private for profit ancilllary service like a hospital vendor that is owned by a friend or relative. Or supporting a private vendor and getting a high paying job when leaving your position at the nonprofit hospital. All the crap that happens in government that despite the "nonprofit" label still amounts to self serving "profits" indirectly. Unions do not solve this problem, but provide a counter force (if uncorrupt) to provide a checks and balances. One is capital and the other is labor. Removing the large private corporate ownership is a better move, but something that is too powerful to dismantle at this point with our government serving basically only their interests. Labor is a force that can take the place of government intervention when inadequate as capital is worthless without labor.
Public education and empowerment is more important than the unionization of a labor force as it is still subject to self serving purposes. The public needs to recognize and control this factor when it undermines the mission of providing healthcare. You just dont want to fall into the trap of choosing someone else to regulate it who can empower themselves and self serve as that is what formal government is and puts us back in the dilemma of our times. The internet provides free and unlimited access to knowledge for public access, but is still influenced (though less so) by propaganda to misinform and control the publics information and thus decision making capacity.
Frightening as it is and against international law but the US legalized domestic propaganda against its citizens within the past year. True its always existed, but legalizing on paper is an effort I find testimony to its tyranny. Educate yourselves and think critically about these issues, but overall don't fight amongst yourselves. Don't believe the person working side by side with you is the reason for your dissatisfaction with your working conditions or wages or your customer or patient in medicine just because they are more proximal. People need and benefit from each other as its natural to our species, but power strucures like noam chomsky has talked about for 60 years separate people from working together effectively to achieve goals they should arrive at easily if left we were left our own devices.
Working within and against negative power structures is why unionization of labor at logical levels such as for physicians makes sense to me. The AMA is maybe made up of only 20% med students but basically 100% join in medical school and their names remain on the roster as members forever without actively reenrolling. So quite wiki all you want, but you should think more critically about things like this as statistics are the greatest tools of liars.
Are you a medical student? Why do you feel the need to prop up the AMA and are so adamant about unionization of physicians? You think it would be detrimental and for what reasons?
Physicians are one of the most disenfranchised groups of labor relative to the 30% of our GDP industry which would stop dead in its tracks (minus APNs who practice independently in some states which is probably .0001% of the GDP that would remain running). No one is saying strike and let people die, which shows your marginal grasp of labor empowerment. Have you started rotations and seen how detrimental medicine is to patients because of policies forced on physicians from hospitals, or because of bogus research fueled by a corporation, or because of the "cost" of patient care that forces physicians to think like assembly line robots. Which is made easier because of a heavy patient load and documentation that numbs their mind to the actual pathophysiology learned in basic sciences. Besides the fact that medicine has very limited efficacy in its resources compared to what the public thinks. The control of pathology without detrimental effects is hard to find on an inpatient ward, and I mean control that should not be enacted in the first place because effects are worse than what the natural course would be without it. But when you try to treat disease in everyone with a single flow chart or diagram thats what you get and thats what corporations like as their are profits to be made in predictive behavior.
