Woke Medicine at the AMA

American Medical Association advises doctors to use woke language. It’s issued a 54-page guide telling doctors things like, don’t say “equality”; say “equity.” Don’t say “minority”; say “historically marginalized.”

Much of the AMA’s advisory sounds like Marxism: “Expose … property rights … Individualism is problematic … Corporations … limit prospects for good health … people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies.”

For some, this is too much, even for those on the left like Matthew Yglesias who wrote This articleThe AMA attracted my attention.

“Can you imagine anyone actually doing this?” asks Yglesias in my New video. “What would happen if you were in a clinical setting, and somebody starts giving you this lecture about landowners? … Nobody practices medicine like that, and it wouldn’t be helpful to anybody!”

He points out that while the AMA now tells doctors to call poor neighborhoods “systematically divested,” not “poor,” it has long lobbied for things that It hurt poor people, like restricting the number of doctors.

The U.S. is home to fewer doctors per capita than any other country. Austria is home to twice as many doctors per head.

“We have the best paid physicians in the world and the scarcest physicians in the world,” says Yglesias. “That’s not a coincidence.”

Since the beginning of time, anybody could be a doctor in America. This was not something licensed doctors liked. The AMA was born.

According to Yglesias, they are a trade organization. “They … advance the interests of their members.”

As the teacher union and dock worker union.

“It’s called a trade association rather than a union,” says Yglesias. “But it’s never been all that different.”

The AMA was founded in 1986. You can make it smaller enrollment in medical schools, to curb an alleged doctor “surplus.” In 1997, it even got the government to pay hospitals It is not Train doctors

Today the AMA supports laws that prevent doctors from practicing in America from being qualified. American residency programs are required for foreign physicians. They won’t be eligible to receive credit for their practice overseas.

These rules help America avoid a doctor shortage. This shortage allows doctors to earn more than $200,000 per year.

Highly paid doctors may be selective about the places they choose to practice. Yglesias says that it is difficult to find a rural doctor.

Rural areas have many Targets or Walmarts, as there are not enough big-box stores. Walmart and Target both compete for the best communities they can serve.

Likewise, “Restaurants keep time that’s convenient for their customers. Doctors keep hours that are convenient for doctors.”

The AMA declined to interview me about it. They sent us a statement saying they’ve worked to approve “approximately 20 new medical schools.”

Why does the AMA and its “Liaison Committee on Medical Education” even get to approve new schools? It isn’t my right to approve any new television reporters.

The AMA’s statement claims it supports “increasing … the number of physicians.” If that’s true, it’s long overdue. According to Annals of Internal Medicine, 7200 people would have their lives saved if they had more primary-care doctors.

People turn to nurses when doctors are not available. However, AMA lobbyists advocate for nursing supervision by a physician.

“That makes it much harder to open retail health clinics … (that offer) low-cost, high-convenience treatment,” says Yglesias. “Nurses have a lot of training … there’s a lot of useful stuff that they can do.”

People who are poorest suffer the most from the AMA’s lobbying.

Talking about this is not something the AMA enjoys. Instead, it now obsesses about politically correct language, telling doctors, don’t say, “ex-cons”; say “formerly incarcerated.” Don’t say “slaves”; say “enslaved people.”

It is hard to believe that this would help patients.

Yglesias concludes, “Getting really obsessed with language politics is a good way to position themselves as the good guys, without addressing their own role in creating these problems.”

John Stossel is creator of Stossel TV and author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”