Sally Pipes, President of the Pacific Research Institute, has written an important article in Forbes analyzing new survey results demonstrating that 87% of medical physicians in the United States no longer view the American Medical Association as representing their views and interests.

Ms. Pipes states: “Much of that dissatisfaction stems from the organization’s support for President Obama’s contentious health care reform package.” The survey, conducted by physician recruitment firm Jackson & Coker, discovered that more than three times as many doctors believed that the quality of American health care would “deteriorate” rather than “improve” under ObamaCare; and nine of ten physicians think ObamaCare will have a negative impact on their profession. Most member driven organizations would collapse with such negative trends; but the AMA survives by collecting up to $70 million from its exclusive relationship with the federal government to provide CPT Codes in direct conflict with medical doctors.

The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code are maintained by the Chicago-based American Medical Association to describe medical, surgical, and diagnostic services and is designed to communicate a uniform set of information about medical services and procedures to physicians, patients, accreditation organizations, and payers for administrative, financial, and Medicare and Medicaid billing coders. These codes have been designated by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services to be published for treatment guidelines and billings.

Federal and state spending on health care is $1.1 trillion; about 42% of all healthcare spending in the U.S. last year. CPT codes set average physician and hospital reimbursement rates. For example the average physician rates for treating Medicare beneficiaries is 81% of the rate private insurers pay and for Medicaid patients the reimbursements are just 56% of the private rate.

American Medical Association 2009 revenue according to “Hoover’s Company Profiles” was $248 million; with $70 million of income coming from “publishing”. This is an especially large percentage of revenue, considering that the AMA membership dues were only $42 million.

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If you were stuck reading just the mainstream media, you would probably have no idea that there is a growing movement among doctors to oppose President Barack Obama’s health care plan.  Dr. Adam Dorin, who practices medicine in southern California, has helped co-found an offshoot of the Tea Party known as The Doctors National TEA Party.

The group is helping make the case to patients across the country about why Obamacare might be bad for their health.  Rather than spin, these doctors are offering facts born from their decades of practicing medicine on America’s frontlines.  They know the consequences for the quality of care when the government gets involved and the folly of many of the reckless assumptions the Obama plan makes.

Dr. Dorin recently appeared on my show and has been kind enough to share some of his personal insights.  As the townhalls of two summers ago showed us, the best way to fight Obamacare is at the grassroots level with cold-hard facts.

Here is what Dr. Dorin and his colleagues wanted to share with us.

An Open Letter Debate Challenge On Obamacare

It is my duty as an American to question any orders or directives from a superior ‘officer’, even the President of the United States, if those orders conflict with my responsibility to uphold the principles and Constitution of the United States, and if they impede my work to preserve the sanctity, safety, and security of its citizens.  Further, I am concerned that there has not been an honest, open and transparent discussion on the true merits of ObamaCare, which the public fully understands.

To this end, I hereby challenge any top leading expert in America who is a supporter of the President’s vision for our national medical system to a fair and open public debate.

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BigGovernment.com has learned that the University of Wisconsin medical school is investigating reports that its
physicians handed out fake medical excuses to union teachers who were planning to call out sick this week.

On Saturday, Andrew Breitbart approached doctors signing teachers up en masse and was told he has ‘[Gov. Scott] Walker Pneumonia.’ Upon putting down his real name, and stating he wasn’t sick and that did “didn’t want to get in trouble,” with cameras filing the scene, one of the alleged doctors became suspicious and demanded that the cameras be shut off.

BigGovernment.com blogger Christian Hartsock and prominent Madison-based blogger and U of W law professor, Ann Althouse chronicled the mass fake doctors note sign-ups, as well.

On Sunday, the Teachers Union backed down and told its members attend class on Tuesday. (more…)

During the healthcare debate conservatives spent months trying to figure out why the leadership of the American Medical Association signed the nation’s doctors up in support of Obamacare.

The AMA endorsed Obamacare when member physicians were fiercely opposed. The groups early support was one factor that contributed to the bill’s passage, contrary to the expressed will of the majority of member physicians.

The answer lies in the AMA’s revenue stream. The AMA has been a puppet of the government since the early 1990’s in order to protect their multi-million dollar monopoly on the CPT coding system that all doctors have to use to bill Medicare and insurance companies, the licensing of which provides the AMA over 70 percent of its income.

The AMA earns only a fraction of its revenue from dues it receives from doctors, representing only 17 percent of doctors nationwide, according to their website. The lion’s share of AMA’s revenue, about $118M, comes from the sale of copyright publishing of billing codes for medical procedures and services.

How the AMA made medical code writing a multimillion dollar business

Before CPT Codes existed and when ICD-9-CM codes were just being developed, doctors had to write out in words what symptoms a patient had, what the diagnosis most likely was, and what visits, services, and procedures they thought they should get paid for. Then in 1966 Current Procedural Terminology or CPT was designed by the AMA to assist doctors in billing Medicare and health providers using codes. Doctors use the CPT Codes to specify to health care providers the service rendered so that they can get paid.

Headquartered in Chicago (Obama’s hometown, no citation needed), the AMA also controls the CPT Editorial Panel and CPT Advisory Committee, along with the staff which is responsible for editing, adding, and deleting CPT Codes.

Until now, doctors had rarely been politically active (unlike lawyers); their tendency was to back away, knowing they could do little as individuals. For years the membership ranks of the AMA have dwindled, but when the AMA betrayed the very people it was ostensibly meant to represent, doctors began organizing on their own.

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Aside from breaking her word to the AMA and physicians across the country, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has effectively demolished doctor reimbursements for most of the healthcare industry.  The 21.2% Medicare fee schedule cut has taken effect, but what most do not realize is that the Medicare fee schedule is the gold standard for provider reimbursement fee schedules across the nation.

Essentially, where Medicare goes, insurers follow for the guidelines in covered services and baseline physician fee schedules for private payers as well as worker’s compensation and automobile insurance companies in most states, as well as Medicaid and Medicare itself.

What Pelosi has effectively done is saved the insurance companies who use the Medicare fee schedule millions of dollars of payouts to physicians on their claims–regardless if the patient is a Medicare patient.  I’m not seeing the insurance lobby out there right now, are you?  However, on the provider side, the doctor’s lobby groups are outraged at Pelosi’s failure and the damage this inaction will cause physicians–especially private–and force them to layoff employees to make up for the loss in reimbursements to cover their enormous monthly overhead costs.

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While the “March Madness” that resulted in the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act of 2010 would lead you to believe that STAT change was needed in our health care system, the on-going delay in the “fix” to the SGR (sustainable growth rate) formula for Medicare invokes images of a long waiting list for a rationed medical procedure.

Medicare, the federal government’s health care insurance plan for the elderly and disabled established in 1965, is largely funded from payroll taxes and FICA, and supplemented with premiums paid by its beneficiaries. It is administered by the Department of Health and Human Services via the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and is the place to look to see how our government will administer a health care system.

Since 1998, the SGR has been a component of the formula used to calculate physician payments for providing services to Medicare patients. It is based on the GDP and not on actual health care practice costs (which have been rising faster than the GDP.) The SGR produced steep cuts in physician compensation for services to Medicare patients, in hopes that by paying individual physicians less, overall health care cost would decrease.

Unfortunately, this approach has failed.

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Attempting to enact his big-government health care scheme, President Obama and his supporters frequently claimed that a “majority” of doctors supported his health-care plans.  When the American Medical Association – which had opposed HillaryCare – signed onto Obama’s plan last year, the organization seemed to make the President’s case.  Most people assumed that the AMA represented most of the doctors in the country.  But in fact, the AMA represents less than 20 percent of all physicians in the United States.  And yet as the organization’s leadership moved more to the left, it held a near monopoly on media attention on issues pertaining to public health.   No longer.

As the AMA has become increasingly politicized in recent years – issuing a statement in support of climate change, for example, in 2008 – a new group of doctors has risen to challenge them.  Like other anti-statist groups that have risen in opposition to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda, Docs4PatientCare are challenging the AMA’s stranglehold on health care matters, just as other groups once challenged the right of the left-leaning American Bar Association to determine what judges are and are not qualified for the United States Supreme Court.  How Docs4PatientCare managed to barge its way into the closed-door meetings of Washington offers a lesson to other groups seeking to have a voice in their federal government.

Founded by Dr. Hal Scherz, a prominent Atlanta physician, the group of doctors expressed concern that like so many other professional groups, the AMA’s leadership have been  thoroughly “Washingtonized” – caring more about the pleadings of other lobbyists on K Street, White House invitations and Capitol Hill committee appearances than the professions they are supposed to represent.  As doctors have taken a battering over several decades from insurance companies, HMOS, and government agencies, Scherz says the AMA was a bystander.

“As the insurance companies become more and more impossible and government intrusion keeps growing, we’ve seen our delivery of care to our patients compromised and our incomes decrease,” he said.

But it was the AMA’s support for ObamaCare that really troubled Scherz and others in his field.

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From today’s Politico:

At a meeting last April with corporate lobbyists, aides to President Barack Obama and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) helped set in motion a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, primarily financed by industry groups, that has played a key role in bolstering public support for health care reform. 

The role Baucus’s chief of staff, Jon Selib, and deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina played in launching the groups was part of a successful effort by Democrats to enlist traditional enemies of health care reform to their side. No quid pro quo was involved, they insist, as do the lobbyists themselves. 

The result has been a somewhat unlikely alliance between an administration that came into power criticizing George W. Bush for his closeness to Big Business and groups such as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the American Medical Association.

Read the whole thing here.