American Medical Association Rebukes Medicare for All

The American Medical Association (AMA) rejected a resolution Tuesday that would have ended their opposition to Medicare for All and backed the single-payer healthcare proposal.

The AMA, which backed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) when Democrats originally drafted the law, defeated a proposal to back Medicare for All, with 53 percent against the proposal and 47 percent in favor of the measure.

The AMA said that they continue to back an expansion of Obamacare and will study a “public option,” through which Americans could either buy government health insurance plans or private health insurance.

Bob Doherty, the senior vice president of government affairs at the American College of Physicians, said that the AMA delegates “are clearly divided, nearly down the middle,” on whether to back Medicare for All.

The AMA has more than 200,000 members and serves as a powerful lobbying group in Congress and also belongs to the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, an organization that lobbies against government health care that is also comprised of health insurers, hospitals, and drug companies.

Over the weekend, 40 leftist activists interrupted the AMA conference by staging a “die in” to have the group back Medicare for All and leave the Partnership.

Approximately 25 percent of the practicing physicians admitted that Obamacare is “not broken, but it is imperfect.”

The AMA instead recommended in a press release that the federal government should provide coverage to the roughly 30 million Americans who do not have health insurance, instead of “upending the health insurance coverage of most Americans.”

The AMA said they back an increase in ACA subsidies for Americans who not currently have health insurance as well as an increase in the amount that the government would pay towards Americans’ out-of-pocket medical expenses if they enrolled in Obamacare plans.