The American Medical Association has responded sharply to a July 20 Washington Post investigative article that found that the AMA/Specialty Society RVS Update Committee (RUC) has overvalued many procedures by overstating the amount of physicians' time required to perform them. Washington Monthly published a critical article about the RUC earlier this month, similarly charging that the RUC is essentially a secret cabal of specialty physicians that overvalues services and fixes prices.
The Post reporters counted the number of Medicare procedures that gastroenterologists, ophthalmologists, orthopedists and other specialists performed at surgery centers in Florida and Pennsylvania. They found that if the physicians had taken the amount of time estimated by the RUC to do each procedure, they would have had to work an average of more than 12 hours a day, when the surgery centers typically were open only 10 hours.
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Hoven
A group of healthcare providers have recommended strategies to reduce five commonly overused and sometimes unnecessary medical treatments or interventions, such as the use of antibiotics for viral upper respiratory infections and early elective deliveries.
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Blackwelder
This year's American Medical Association House of Delegates meeting featured a renewed sense of collegiality, no noticeable net change in the number of bearded delegates, a recognition of ties between current delegates and momentous health policy events from 50 years ago, and—speaking of ties—a return of one of the more prominent bow tie-wearing delegates.
The AMA's new president, Dr. Ardis Dee Hoven, said in an interview that she felt a “good spirit” at the meeting. This was echoed by Shaan Gandhi, a fourth-year Harvard Medical School student and an alternate delegate from Massachusetts. Gandhi said he enjoyed the mix of healthcare policy discussions—ranging from support for a ban on the marketing of energy drinks to youths to delaying the implementation of the ICD-10 set of diagnosis and procedural codes. Gandhi said he definitely would attend future meetings.
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Critics of the American Medical Association argue that the organization's ranks have shrunk to the point where it can no longer claim to be the voice of the nation's doctors. Now new demographic information suggests that, not only might the AMA no longer represent doctors, but its membership and leadership may not be
representative of the U.S. physician population.
According to two newly released reports on the U.S. physician population and the AMA's leadership and membership demographics, the country's oldest and still-largest physician organization is doing OK in some respects at matching the changing gender demographics of the nation's physician workforce. But the age distribution of AMA members and leaders doesn't come close to mirroring the age range of physicians currently in practice.
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