For decades, the A.M.A. has been one of the country’s most effective opponents of progressive health-care reform. Can the organization be convinced to embrace single-payer health care?
Joy Lee and Dan Pfeifle arrived early for the June, 2019, meeting of the American Medical Association, where they were helping to lead a gathering of the A.M.A’s medical-student delegation. The medical students usually assembled early to discuss priorities, but this year they had an additional reason to strategize: they had decided that they would try to persuade the A.M.A.
“I kid you not, there was an audible gasp in the room,” Sophia Spadafore, who at the time was a team leader in the medical-student section’s caucus, recalled. “All these delegates we had never met were coming up to us after, saying, ‘You’re doing it, you’ll get it next time, keep going, we support you.’ ” Much to their surprise, the students had come close to staging a revolution in American medicine.
In the same period, new understandings of disease and human physiology combined with more rigorous training to improve the practice of medicine. This built a respect for the profession which, in turn, helped spur attempts to create a publicly financed health-care system. Progressives introduced such legislation at the state and national levels, and, in June, 1917, the A.M.A. endorsed compulsory health insurance.
In the early nineteen-nineties, the Clinton Administration sought the A.M.A.’s support for its health-care initiative. Hillary Clinton flew to Chicago to speak at its annual meeting; her speech was greeted with a mix of warmth and wariness. Some smaller organizations backed the plan, some opposed it, and the A.M.A. largely sat out the fight. A decade and a half later, the A.M.A.
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