The AMA Debates a Federal Ban on Corporate Medicine

The American Medical Association has been considering a resolution to seek a federal ban on the corporate practice of medicine at its interim House of Delegates meeting that concludes on Tuesday.

The resolution, submitted by Florida emergency physician Vicki Norton, who helped compile a 70-page white paper on corporate medicine statutes recently released by the grassroots physician group Take Medicine Back, was almost shelved entirely after it mysteriously landed on a list of resolutions “not for consideration” at the meeting Saturday morning. But a physician unaffiliated with the reformers appealed the decision on behalf of an AMA subcommittee with a brief but passionate speech on the urgency of reversing the profession’s annexation by Wall Street investment firms:

“We are being picked clean by private equity,” the physician, New Jersey radiologist Christopher Gribbin, said. “There are people who don’t know where their next paycheck is even going to come from because their groups have been flipped so often … [This resolution] is protecting both physicians and patients, it is preserving physician autonomy and preventing burnout. Seventy-four percent of physicians [are] employed; just four years ago it was 50 percent. Private equity has spent $1 trillion in the last decade on acquisitions in buying medical practices. We need to have something to talk about with respect to private equity at this meeting.”

Read more at The American Prospect >>