The AMA’s Forgotten Fight Against Physician Greed
By MICHAEL MILLENSON
Perhaps the most well-known part of the 1965 Medicare creation tale is the opposition by the American Medical Association (AMA) to “socialized medicine.” Yet with financial incentives assuming a new prominence for provider and patient alike, we shouldn’t overlook the AMA’s equally unsuccessful battle against the excesses of capitalistic medicine. The forgotten story of the professionalism’s failure to contain physician greed provides an important policy perspective.
The Myth Of Medicine’s ‘Golden Age’
Medical practice pre-1965 is often portrayed as a mythical “Golden Age.” The truth, as I found researching my 1997 book, Demanding Medical Excellence: Doctors and Accountability in the Information Age, was that the post-war years were a time when way too many doctors grasped for the gold.
The most common “entrepreneurial” excesses were fee splitting, where a specialist paid a kickback to the referring doctor, and ghost surgery, where a surgeon secretly paid a colleague to operate on an anesthetized patient. The first surgeon paid the “ghost” a small part of the total fee and pocketed the difference. Even worse was rampant surgical overuse, where common excesses included appendectomies for stomachaches and hysterectomies on young women with nothing more than back pain.
Although professional societies wielded far more influence than now, efforts by leaders of the AMA and the American College of Surgeons to stop these abuses repeated...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs
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