Word: ama
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...leaders of the Republican Party, a public health-care-insurance option is a "non-starter," the first step on a slippery slope to socialized medicine; in the eyes of the American Medical Association (AMA), it could "restrict patient choice"; while for President Barack Obama, as he put it on Monday during his speech to the AMA in Chicago, it's an essential part of any health-care-reform package that would "put affordable health care within reach for millions of Americans...
...central idea behind a public plan is that it would provide health insurance for many of the nearly 50 million Americans who are currently uninsured or for those who are unhappy with their private insurance options. In his much anticipated address to the AMA on Monday, Obama stressed that he does not view a public insurance option as a pathway to dismantling the private insurance industry or creating a single-payer government system like the one that exists in Canada...
...important for us to build on our traditions here in the United States. So, when you hear the naysayers claim that I'm trying to bring about government-run health care, know this: they are not telling the truth." (After the New York Times reported last week the AMA's opposition to a public plan, the group said its stance had been misinterpreted and that it would be "willing to consider other variations of a public plan that are currently under discussion in Congress.") (Watch a video about uninsured Americans...
...shake up the system, a public plan would need to have enough doctors and hospitals participating as part of its network. Many Democrats believe that would only happen if providers were forced to accept patients, most likely as a condition of participating in Medicare - an idea that the AMA and others reject out of hand. Yet, as Blumberg points out, for all the conservative scare stories about government health care, "the people with the most choice are the people who are in the traditional Medicare program ... [with access to] a huge network of providers because of market power." (Read "Obama...
...AMA, which is the nation's leading physicians organization, is not the political force that it once was, but its opposition could nonetheless complicate the push for overall reform. So as much as Obama is trying to stay with broad campaign themes emphasizing the larger need for health-care reform, he's also going to have to spell out more clearly where he stands on some of its tougher questions. In fact, that kind of reckoning may come as early as Monday, when he reaches the next stop on his health-care campaign trail - a speech at the AMA...