American Medical Association backs off policy opposing some health care reform

One day after President Barack Obama urged physicians to support a new public plan to cover millions of uninsured Americans, a top doctors group backed away from a policy that could have been viewed as opposing reform.

On Tuesday, the American Medical Association considered a resolution that would have opposed any new public plan that would "risk the elimination of a healthy competitive market for private health insurance."

Before its delegates moved toward final passage, AMA president Nancy H. Nielsen intervened and asked delegates to focus on what they could support.

Saying health care reform was in "enormous flux," Nielsen cautioned physicians against laying down markers that would make them look inflexible. Many AMA members expressed similar concern that media reports would portray them as opposed to reform.

"Let's get some positive press for the AMA," said Mario E. Motta, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Nielsen also tried to blunt an effort by conservative physicians who equate government-run health care with socialism and think a new public plan would crowd out private insurers.

"I do not believe it's the position of this House of Delegates of the American Medical Association to protect the health insurance industry," Nielsen said, prompting loud applause from the members.

"I think the health insurance industry pays a lot of money to people who can protect them."

The AMA's Texas delegation expressed support for an effort to exclude the term "public option" from what the AMA would support.

"It's a lightning rod" but "nobody really knows what it is," said John T. Gill, an orthopedic surgeon from Dallas.

Physicians who favor a public plan said Nielsen's intervention may have kept the AMA at the table. The group will take final action on its policy today.

"That was about creating an impression that we are not part of the problem, we are part of the solution," said Ted Epperly, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

The debate occurred on the day that Nielsen's tenure as AMA president ended. She was succeeded by J. James Rohack, a Temple cardiologist who is a former president of the Texas Medical Association.

In a speech, Rohack said the AMA needed to embrace ways to "have health insurance coverage for all Americans." Rohack also said physicians needed to focus on cutting out wasteful procedures that drive up health care costs.

"The need" for reform "is unmistakable and urgent," Rohack said.

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