American Medical Association. The American Medical Association (AMA) was formed in 1847 by elite physicians hoping to improve the stature of their profession. This was no small task in the crowded and chaotic nineteenth‐century medical marketplace, where homeopaths and other practitioners of alternative medicine challenged orthodox physicians' claims to authority and patients. Although AMA leaders aimed to improve standards of
medical education and practice, regulate relations among physicians, represent the profession to the public, and promote “the usefulness, honor and interests of the medical profession,” in its first fifty years the AMA won only lackluster support from physicians and possessed little public visibility or political power.
In 1901, the association reorganized itself, instituting a proportional representation system that gave state and local associations a voice in a newly created House of Delegates, which approved the association's policies and positions. Led by J.N. McCormack, national AMA representatives helped state and local medical societies reorganize themselves as constituent units in the national organization. As a result, membership increased dramatically, from fewer than ten thousand in 1900 to around seventy thousand in 1910.
A more active and public profile accompanied this growth. The AMA's Council on Medical Education, for instance, monitored medical schools and their facilities, making the association a
de facto arbiter of national standards governing medical education. The
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) became one of the world's preeminent medical journals, and the association began publishing specialized journals as well. AMA bureaus endeavored to safeguard the public's health by debunking quackery and so‐called miracle cures, permitting approved food and drug advertisers to use the AMA seal, and sponsoring educational programs for the general public.
Historians of medicine have focused much attention on the association's objections to what its leaders termed “socialistic tendencies” in the organization of medical care. An AMA committee endorsed compulsory health insurance at the state level in the late 1910s, but the association soon recanted. Over the next three decades, the AMA (often represented by
JAMA's vocal editor Morris Fishbein) condemned advocates of federal health programs, government‐sponsored health insurance, and other initiatives that threatened to disrupt the traditional physician‐patient relationship or provide alternatives to fee‐for‐service medical practice. These battles peaked in the late 1940s when the AMA helped mobilize opposition to President Harry S.
Truman's national health insurance plan and lent its support to private plans instead. This stance held through the 1960s and after, as the AMA leadership fought—and then reluctantly accepted—Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs considered government intrusions into medical practice.
The AMA grew slightly less conservative in the last quarter of the twentieth century, as the balance of power shifted among the medical profession, the federal government, commercial insurers, and advocates of health‐care reform. Nevertheless, with its substantial membership and tradition of vigorous advocacy, the association remained an important player in American health‐care politics, widely regarded as “the voice of the American medical profession.”
See also
Health Insurance;
Health Maintenance Organizations;
Medicare and Medicaid;
Medicine.
Bibliography
James G. Burrow , AMA: Voice of American Medicine, 1963.
Paul Starr , The Social Transformation of American Medicine, 1982.
Elizabeth Toon
