Medical Profession as a Guild
March 8, 2010
By Joe Gordon Owner Differential Pressure
Opinion
The medical delivery system is now a complex system that has reached a tipping point and the results are killing small business.
I am passionate about this subject as a small businessman, as chairman of the Branford EDC, and as teacher of “Starting your own business” with ERACE in Branford High School.
• Critics of the American Medical Association, including economist Milton Friedman, have asserted that the organization acts as a guild and has attempted to increase physicians’ wages and fees limit by influencing limitations on the supply of physicians and non-physician competition. In Free to Choose, Friedman said “The AMA has engaged in extensive litigation charging chiropractors and osteopaths with the unlicensed practice of medicine, in an attempt to restrict them to as narrow an area as possible.”
• Profession and Monopoly, a book published in 1975, is critical of the AMA for limiting the supply of physicians and inflating the cost of medical care in the United States. The book claims that physician supply is kept low by the AMA to ensure high pay for practicing physicians. It states that in the United States the number, curriculum, and size of medical schools are restricted by state licensing boards controlled by representatives of state medical societies associated with the AMA. The book is also critical of the ethical rules adopted by the AMA that restrict advertisement and other types of competition between professionals. It points out that advertising and bargaining can result in expulsion from the AMA and legal revocation of licenses. The book also states that before 1912, the AMA included uniform fees for specific medical procedures in its official code of ethics. The AMA’s influence on hospital regulation was also criticized in the book.
• The AMA and other industry groups predicted an over-supply of doctors and worked to limit the number of new doctors. But recently, the AMA has changed its position, predicting a doctor shortage instead.
Interesting concept.
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I had no idea this kind of “regulating” was being done by the AMA on medical professionals. Thank you for writing this informative article, I’ll be doing some more research on this topic. This is just another example of how hidden interference and manipulation prevents the free market from operating as it should, so that preferred “fixes” can be implemented e.i. “universal healthcare”.
More “real” information such as this needs to be brought to the general public’s attention since the 30 second sound byte media of today does nothing other than distract, distort and deceive.
Great article.
Thank you. All that an interested politician has to do is to demand to see the schoolastic records of the top 100 applicants denyed to any medical school to see exactly what’s going on here. For YEARS the AMA has been saying that there are too many doctors. Now the cat is out of the bag, we find 24 new medical schools in the works