ThinkProgress Logo

Stories tagged with “American Medical Association”

LGBT

Major Medical Organizations To SCOTUS: Marriage Inequality Hurts Gay People

By Zack Ford on Mar 4, 2013 at 12:40 pm

The American Sociological Association filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to disregard arguments against same-sex parenting in the Proposition 8 and Defense of Marriage Act cases, but a coalition of other medical organizations also filed a brief explaining the consequences of denying gays, lesbians, and bisexuals the freedom to marry. The signers of this brief include the America Psychological Association, the American Medial Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Association of Social Workers, among other mental health professional organizations. In addition to reiterating the validity of same-sex couples’ parenting, the medical professionals argue that laws like Proposition 8 harm same-sex couples by denying them specific benefits that marriage offers:

Married men and women generally experience better physical and mental health than their unmarried counterparts. These health benefits do not appear to result simply from being in an intimate relationship, for most studies have found that married heterosexual individuals generally manifest greater well-being than those of comparable cohabiting couples. [...]

Being married also is a source of stability and commitment. Marital commitment is a function not only of attractive forces (i.e ., rewarding features of the partner or relationship) but also of external forces that serve as constraints on dissolving the relationship. Barriers to terminating a marriage include feelings of obligation to one’s family members; moral and religious values; legal restrictions; financial concerns; and the anticipated disapproval of others. In the absence of adequate rewards, the existence of barriers alone is not sufficient to sustain a marriage in the long term. Perceiving one’s intimate relationship primarily in terms of rewards, rather than barriers to dissolution, is likely to be associated with greater relationship satisfaction. Nonetheless, perceived barriers are negatively correlated with divorce and thus the presence of barriers may increase partners’ motivation to seek solutions for problems, rather than rushing to dissolve a salvageable relationship.

Lacking access to legal marriage, the primary motivation for same-sex couples to remain together derives mainly from the rewards associated with the relationship rather than from formal barriers to separation. Given this fact, and the legal and prejudicial obstacles that same-sex partners face, the prevalence and durability of same-sex relationships are striking.

In other words, same-sex couples are forming lasting relationships even in spite of the fact that many of the protective factors for keeping families together are not present due to discrimination like Prop 8. Conservatives have argued that gay people shouldn’t have access to marriage because they want it for the selfish reason of validating their intimacy. But as these social science experts argue, the opposite is true — there are benefits to marriage beyond intimacy and commitment, and it’s for same-sex couples’ own well-being that they deserve access to those benefits.

It’s hard to argue there’s a compelling societal benefit for discrimination when social science shows there’s actually a compelling societal benefit for equality.

Climate Progress

Memo To Media: ‘Climate Sensitivity’ Is NOT The Same As Projected Future Warming, World Faces 10°F Rise

By Joe Romm on Feb 4, 2013 at 7:08 pm

The major media continue to sow confusion on one of the central questions of our time: How much warming will we subject our children and countless future generations to?

The answer to that question depends primarily on four factors:

  1. The so-called “equilibrium climate sensitivity” – the sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor. The ECS is how much warming you get if we suddenly adopt a super-aggressive effort to cut carbon pollution and only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm — and there are no major “slow” feedbacks.  We know the fast feedbacks, like water vapor, are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and Skeptical Science piece here).
  2. The actual CO2 concentration level we hit, which on our current emissions path is far, far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).
  3. The real-world slower (decade-scale) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100“).
  4. Where they live — since people who live in the mid-latitudes (like most Americans) are projected to warm considerably more than the global average.

The media, perhaps aided by some scientists who aren’t great at communications, tend to focus on just #1, a number the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report pegged as “likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values.” While the majority of studies tend to be in the middle of the range, a couple have been near the low end, though some have been at the higher end.

In any case, focusing on the fast-feedback sensitivity perhaps made sense in the distant past when there was some reasonable chance of stabilizing at 560 parts per million atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (double the preindustrial level) and some hope the slow feedbacks might not matter.

Indeed, the scientific community focused on a doubling I think in part because they didn’t believe humanity would be as self-destructive as brainless frogs and ignore the increasingly dire warnings for over two decades now.

As I explained in Nature online back in 2008 (here), once you factor in carbon-cycle feedbacks, even the uber-cautious Fourth Assessment report (AR4) of the IPCC makes clear we are headed toward 1000 ppm (the A1FI scenario). That conclusion has been supported by just about every major independent analysis, including a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (see Study: We’re Headed To 11°F Warming And Even 7°F Requires “Nearly Quadrupling The Current Rate Of Decarbonisation“). That means it doesn’t matter terribly much whether the ECS is 3C, or, say, only 2.5C.

It is worth noting that while the Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation (!) and add up to 1.5°F to warming in 2100 by itself, “Participating modeling teams have completed their climate projections in support of the [IPCC's] Fifth Assessment Report, but these projections do not include the permafrost carbon feedback.” D’oh!

Given that the Arctic is already losing ice decades faster than any AR4 model had projected, we should expect that the permafrost will go faster than the models suggest. Indeed a 2008 study by leading tundra experts found “Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss.” The study’s ominous conclusion:

We find that simulated western Arctic land warming trends during rapid sea ice loss are 3.5 times greater than secular 21st century climate-change trends. The accelerated warming signal penetrates up to 1500 km inland….

Anyone who tells you the recent literature suggests things will be better than we thought, hasn’t read the recent literature. In a 2010 AAAS presentation, the late William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge“: New scientific findings since the 2007 IPCC report are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

Figure 7.

“Projections of global warming relative to pre-industrial for the A1FI emissions scenario” — the one we’re currently on. “Dark shading shows the mean ±1 s.d. [standard deviation] for the tunings to 19 AR4 GCMs [IPCC Fourth Assessment General Circulation Models] and the light shading shows the change in the uncertainty range when … climate-carbon-cycle feedbacks … are included.”

Again, we are headed to 11F and just keeping to 7F will take a major effort. But warming beyond 7F is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level,” as climate expert Kevin Anderson explains here.

Everyone interested in what we face should should read the recent World Bank Climate Report, which concluded, “A 4°C [7°F] world can, and must, be avoided” to avert “devastating” impacts. Also worth reading is the Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming, which details the “hellish vision” of 7°F (4°C) world (and is the source of the figure above). The concluding piece in the issue notes soberly:

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Report: Obama’s Affordable Care Act Will Save Medicare $200 Billion | The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health care reform law, will reportedly save Medicare more than $2 billion by 2016, while saving seniors nearly $60 billion in out-of-pocket costs, according to a new report released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). According to the report, Medicare’s largest savings come from “cuts to doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers, as well as private insurance companies,” which amounts to more than $150 billion. The ACA will also save seniors roughly $59.4 billion by 2016, and $208 billion though 2021.


– Fatima Najiy

By Guest Blogger on Apr 23, 2012 at 1:00 pm

NEWS FLASH

Primary Care Doctors: Americans Receive Too Much Care | Nearly half of primary care physicians “said their patients received too much medical care and more than a quarter said they were practicing more aggressively than they’d like to,” according to a new poll. Physicians complained that they were “ordering more tests, prescribing more drugs or diagnosing people with diseases, although they would never have experienced any symptoms.” The Affordable Care Act, which the American Medical Association (AMA) endorsed, seeks to discourage this kind of overtreatment by reforming the reimbursement system and paying physicians for delivering more efficient health care.

NEWS FLASH

77 Percent Of Doctors Say AMA Does Not Represent Their Views | Seventy-seven percent of physicians “say the American Medical Association does not represent their views, according to a new volunteer-based online survey by the physician staffing firm Jackson & Coker. Just 11 percent said AMA’s stance and actions reflects their beliefs.” The doctors also rated AMA as ineffective in lobbying for their priorities, including tort reform (72 percent called AMA ineffective), physician practice autonomy (69 percent), physician reimbursement (68 percent), protections from insurance company abuses (75 percent), and “intrusive government regulations” (78 percent).

The AMA took a big hit after it failed to secure a deal to stave off reimbursement cuts (changing the so-called SGR formula) as part of the Affordable Care Act and that did nothing to stop the slow bleed of doctors turning their backs on the organization. While it theoretically represents all physicians, the AMA’s paying membership comprises somewhere between 15 to 18 percent of doctors. Consequently, member dues accounted for a relatively small percentage of AMA revenue. The rest of its funds come from things like billing codes, CMS payment negotiations, and other non-membership-related operations.

Related Posts

Justice

VIDEO: Rick Perry Flip Flops On Medicare, Claims He ‘Never Said It Was Unconstitutional’

By Scott Keyes on Aug 29, 2011 at 9:50 am

ThinkProgress filed this report from Des Moines, Iowa.

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) released his book Fed Up! in late 2010, one of his main critiques was that, over the past 50 years, the federal government has misconstrued the Constitution to establish “the massive programs of Medicare and Medicaid.” Now that he’s running for president, Perry is trying to sing a different tune on Medicare.

In an interview with the Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Perry explained why he thinks Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional:

I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that.

Yesterday, at a Polk County GOP fundraiser, the Des Moines Register’s Jennifer Jacobs asked Perry to further explain why he believes Medicare is unconstitutional. In a moment of amnesia, the Texas governor declared, “I never said it was unconstitutional.” Perry went on to state, “[t]hose that have said that I said [Medicare and Social Security are] unconstitutional, I’m going to have them read the book.”

JACOBS: You talked about Social Security, can you clarify why you think Medicare is unconstitutional?

PERRY: I never said it was unconstitutional.

JACOBS: Okay, so clarify your position on Medicare.

PERRY: I look at Medicare just like I look at Social Security. They’re programs that aren’t working and we ought to have a national conversation about it. Those that have said that I said they’re unconstitutional, I’m going to have them read the book. That’s not what I said. I said that we need to have a conversation, how are we going to have programs that actually work.

Watch it:

In Fed Up!, Perry explains on page 51 how Medicare is a misreading of the Commerce Clause. On page 48, he calls Social Security “by far the best example” of a program that “violently toss[es] aside any respect for our founding principles.” And on page 50, he says that we have Social Security “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.”

For Perry to claim that he “never said” Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional is either a blatant flip-flop or a significant case of amnesia. In either case, with statements like these, one has to ask: has Rick Perry read his own book?

NEWS FLASH

Outgoing AMA President: ‘So Important’ That Health Reform Invested In Comparative Effectiveness Research | The American Medical Association (AMA) has been slow to accept comparative effectiveness research (CER), fearing that its findings could lead to new guidelines and regulations. But during an interview with NPR, outgoing AMA President Cecil Wilson spoke favorably about the research, saying how it is “so important” that last year’s health law included “funding for what we call comparative effectiveness research; in order to gain information that will help us to clearly define what studies are indicated and when.”

NEWS FLASH

American Medical Association Endorses The Individual Mandate | MedPage Today just sent out this alert: “The American Medical Association’s House of Delegates voted this afternoon to endorse the concept of an individual mandate that requires most U.S. residents to buy health insurance, reaffirming the organization’s longstanding position on the controversial issue.”

Update

The Chicago Tribune adds: “The results of the vote were 326 in favor and 165 opposed. Without an individual mandate, supporters said people will wait to buy health insurance until they are sick, and that would lead to a spike in premiums for all.”

Health

Did Health Reform Death Panel The AMA?

By Igor Volsky on Jun 16, 2010 at 6:00 pm

obamaAMAIf there are any death panels in health care reform, then they may have very well killed the American Medical Association, which suffered another loss in the Senate this afternoon after Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) failed to secure enough votes to patch the 21% pay cut coming to physicians participating in the Medicare program.

In 2009, the AMA lent its support to the health law after receiving assurances that Congress would scrap the existing SGR formula to avoid future cuts, but now, as Democrats continue to look for 60 votes, Republicans are letting it be known that there is a price to pay for bucking the grand old party:

– SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK): “I don’t blame the AMA for being upset, but they kind of walked into this themselves by embracing, and then not embracing, and then embracing” the reform bill, he said. “It didn’t have an SGR fix and it didn’t have liability fix. The two goals that every doctor that’s associated with AMA wants—they want payment reform and they want liability reform—they got none of it.”

– SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): “For some inexplicable reason, I think the AMA has kind of burned all its bridges. It just makes absolutely no sense to me.”

– SEN. JOHN THUNE (R-SD): “That’s why a lot of Republicans right now are looking at this issue and saying: ‘Yeah, we want to help you. We want to fix this. We thought it should have been fixed a long time ago.’ But [they] are not particularly sympathetic to their sense of urgency about getting a 10-year fix in place given the fact that it should have been done in the health care debate.”

The AMA’s trouble counting Republican votes began as early as last year, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) attempted to pass a $245 billion 10-year doc fix. The legislation wasn’t offset and failed to garner a single Republican vote, despite AMA assurances to the contrary. “We were told by the American Medical Association and others, that we would get help by the Republicans to take care of senior citizens so they could have doctors to take care of them,” Reid lamented. The vote represented a defeat for the group, which had spent some $2 million dollars lobbying for the SGR in the weeks before the vote.

Doctors — the organization’s supposed bread and butter — are also turning their backs on the organization. While it theoretically represents all physicians, the AMA’s current paying membership comprises somewhere between 15 to 18% of doctors, declining almost 3.4% in 2009 to 228,000 — itself about a 2% decline from the 241,000 reported for 2007. (The 2007 figure is notable in that it marked the first time in seven years that membership increased, about a 1% jump. But that boost was achieved by giving away 8,577 free memberships for first-year residents who had been student members the previous year.)” Consequently, the dues accounted for just 16% of AMA revenue. The rest of its funds come from things like billing codes, CMS payment negotiations, and other non-membership-related operations.

Now, the group is on record as supporting an unpopular health care law and remains powerless in preventing the pending reimbursement cuts. Its hemorrhaging membership problem and its political decline will create an opportunity for other physicians’ group to fill the leadership void. Whether they’ll be more successful in completely reforming SGR and guiding the country’s transition through health reform however, is a different question altogether.

Health

Rep. Tom Price: ‘Real Cross-Section’ Of Physicians ‘Would Not Have Been Applauding’ Obama’s Health Reform

By Igor Volsky on Oct 5, 2009 at 4:45 pm

ObamaDocs

“[W]hen you cut through all of the noise and all of the distractions that are out there, I think what’s most telling is that some of the people who are most supportive of [health care] reform are the very medical professionals who know the health care system best, the doctors and nurses of America,” President Obama told the 150 medical professional assembled in the Rose Garden for an event highlighting the medical community’s support for health care reform.

Obama urged the doctors to speak out on behalf of reform. “You are the people who know this system best, you are the experts, nobody has more credibility with the American people on this issue than you do,” he said. “If you’re willing to speak out strongly on behalf of the things you care about, and what you see each and every day as you’re serving patients all across the country, I’m confident we are going to get health reform passed this year.”

Responding to Obama, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) — who spent his summer running a misleading campaign to trick physicians into opposing health care reform — and former AMA President Dr. Donald Palmisano held a conference call dismissing physicians’ support for reform. Price said he was “concerned that a hand-picked group were applauding a government take-over of health care.” A “real cross-section would not have been applauding government takeover of health care.”

Doctors may not applaud a “government-takeover,” but a “real cross-section” of physicians does support the public option and Medicare expansion. One survey of over 2,000 doctors found that “whether they lived in southern regions of the United States or traditionally liberal parts of the country…whether they were salaried or they were practice owners, regardless of whether they were specialists or primary care providers,” a majority supported a public option:

- 73 percent of physicians: supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options

- 62 percent of AMA respondents: expressed support for some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options

- 58 percent of physicians: support Medicare expansions to individuals 55 to 64 years of age

Price insisted that “thousands” of physicians “are coming to Washington, expressing their concern about the President’s program.” A reporter on the call reminded Price and Palmisano that the American Medical Association has endorsed the House health bill — which includes a robust public plan. Palmisano responded that they had not consulted him before making the endorsement.

Older

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up