The American Medical Association Endorses the Ultra-Liberal House Democratic Health Care Reform Proposal – Is This a Surprise?

The American Medical Association has just endorsed (link) the House Democrats’ health care reform proposal, unveiled last week, and regarded by everyone I have read as the most ultra-liberal of all proposals announced thus far. So ultra-liberal, in fact, that no one I have heard or read gives it much chance of becoming law, let alone even passing the Democrat-controlled House.

Tevi Troy writes (link) at The Corner blog at National Review Online that this proposal “raises taxes, imposes both individual and employer mandates, and creates a government-run health-care plan. This is not surprising, as the House [Democrats’] Leadership’s strategy appears to be to pass a bill that is as far to the left as possible in order to have maximum leverage when negotiating with whatever compromise comes out of the Senate.”

It is hard to believe that a majority of the AMA membership would support this House Democrat proposal, once given a chance to read it. So it is somewhat surprising to have the AMA leadership release this quick endorsement, supporting a plan hatched by the radically-liberal Pelosi and containing the Trojan Horse government run “public option” plan that will surely and shortly eradicate private insurers, leaving all healthcare in the hands of liberal federal government bureaucrats and all doctors as de facto federal employees. And what sentient doctor thinks there's a snowball's chance in hell that Democrats would move one inch toward much-needed reform of malpractice liability law, a very high priority for most doctors?

One factor that must be huge here – the tendency of all large, ostensibly non-political organizations, from philanthropic foundations to professional societies like the American Bar Association, to become progressively more liberal over time, as liberals, executing one of the key directives from their playbook, slowly take over internal staff bureaucracies and elected leadership positions, and then isolate and suppress less-organized and less politically-astute internal opponents.

John M Greco