Word: amas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could rise if PacifiCare Health Systems, based in Cypress, Calif., enters the market--the company hopes to put together a pilot program by late next year--and the cost of health insurance continues to rise at an annual rate of 12.7%. And in spite of the American Medical Association (AMA), which warns of inferior care in Mexico, the idea is winning converts in other border states, including Arizona and Texas, where legislators and academics are studying ways to set up their own cross-border plans...
...AMA has not presented any legal challenges to cross-border plans, but it criticizes them. "We always have to be concerned with the quality," says former AMA president Richard Corlin, a gastroenterologist in Santa Monica, Calif. Corlin remembers a patient telling him about a medication he was taking, which Corlin immediately recognized as a drug banned a year earlier in the U.S. because it produced sometimes fatal heart arrhythmia. "He said, 'I get it in Mexico.' Is there someone controlling what they have access to and what they haven't? We do a pretty good job of that in this...
...theory is that alcohol control, like the regulation of tobacco, can no longer be treated as simply a matter of individual responsibility. Says Richard Yoast, director of the AMA Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse: "Trying to convince students not to binge drink doesn?t work, particularly when they?re surrounded by powerful social influences encouraging them to do just that. Every night they are lured by cheap drink specials. Couple that with easy access to alcohol, and glamorous, fun, sex-filled advertising imagery, and you have a very appealing message." Change the environment, argues Yoast...
...colleges began to recognize binge drinking was a problem they had to face. (And everybody took notice recently when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology paid a $6 million settlement to the family of a student who died of alcohol poisoning). And now, thanks to the AMA initiative, communities are beginning to get involved, too. They see tax dollars being spent on sanitation workers cleaning vomit off the streets, hospitals giving emergency care to scores of students after every fraternity rush, police officers investigating drinking-related cases of vandalism and sexual assault...
...AMA?s goal, says spokeswoman Lisa Erk, "is systemic social change." This means forming a partnership between colleges and their communties to get bars off campus, halt two-for-one drink specials and increase alcohol-free social options. Students, of course, will complain (at Wisconsin the chancellor is sometimes called the "booze cop"). And so might townspeople: why can?t a responsible drinker enjoy a beer or two at the football game, or get a discount for stopping by at happy hour? That's what happens when you craft policy to deal with the worst offenders. The innocents have...