We shouldn't be surprised that the American Medical Association has come out against government-sponsored insurance plan. In recent years the AMA has increasingly been a tool for promoting right-wing ideologies. Although it still pretends to be the voice of American physicians, in fact it has been losing membership steadily for the past several years. The most recent information I could find says that about a third of American physicians are members. It has struggled financially with dwindling membership dues.
The AMA these days has many concerns other than medicine. It is a main proponent of "tort reform," a vast right-wing conspiracy to enhance corporate profits by denying citizens' 7th Amendment rights to sue for damages in court.
The AMA and the American Council of Engineering Companies are co-founders of the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which has turned into an umbrella group of special interests and astroturf organizations pushing for tort reform legislation. The ties of "tort reform" to the Right, via Karl Rove, are legendary.
Take, for example, the organization Citizens for Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), which has chapters in several states actively pushing "tort reform" to state legislatures. According to SourceWatch, CALA is an astroturf organization commissioned by the Philip Morris tobacco company in 1995, and Philip Morris continues to fund and direct CALA through ATRA. SourceWatch says,
A "privileged and confidential" Philip Morris (PM) tort reform budget from 1995shows that PM spent over $16 million to instigate tort reform during that year alone, and that PM paid an international public relations firm called APCO & Associates (now known as APCO Worldwide) almost $1 million in 1995 to implement tort reform efforts behind the scenes.
ATRA promotes CALA on its website (scroll to bottom) as
... citizen activists fed up with the high cost and injustice in our legal system. They work actively within their communities to urge individual responsibility, safety, and to chronicle abuses of the legal system and to fight for civil justice reform.
Yeah, right.
It is ironic that the AMA, which 20 years ago stood up to the tobacco industry by calling for a ban on tobocco ads, is now in bed with it. They're shacked up in a shabby off-the interstate motel hoping no one finds them, but they're in bed just the same.
Seducing the States
Recently CALA and other well-funded astroturf organizations have been seducing state legislatures with promises of cheaper health care. And through the magic of tort reform, they whisper enticingly, states also can have stimulated economies, lower costs of living and more jobs.
Then the bill is signed by the governor and the astroturf organizations move on, leaving behind laws that cap damage awards even for catastrophic losses and raise the burden of proof a plaintiff must hurdle to file his suit. In some cases people who have suffered real injury find they cannot file suit at all, but must submit to an arbitration system that's set up to favor the defendant.
Elsewhere I have taken apart the claims made for tort reform and show why they're empty, and I'm not going to repeat all of that here. I would like to ask that any reader who doesn't understand why tort reform as the Right is selling it is not a good idea to read the post linked above as well as my series "The Truth About Health Care and Tort Reform and "The Tort Number Crunch."
I do not claim that personal injury law in the U.S. is perfect, or that it is never abused. There are a number of thorny issues that need to be resolved regarding specific types of claims, such as mesothelioma resulting from decades-past asbestos exposure, if the law is going to be fair to both complainants and defendants.
My argument, however, is that before citizens allow state and federal legislatures to reduce their rights to take grievances to court, we all need to clearly understand the arguments being made for tort reform. Most of those arguments are flat-out lies. And the AMA is helping to push those lies.