News & Media
AMA at 175: Our National Partner Collaborating With MSMS to Achieve Widespread Success
The gains we constantly make in diagnosing and treating illness and injury are easy to take for granted – until we realize just how far organized medicine has advanced since the mid-1800s, when bloodletting and blistering helped place “bodily humors” back into balance.
Today, next-generation mRNA vaccines and groundbreaking advancements in gene therapy are just two examples demonstrating our tremendous progress in restoring health and maintaining wellness for all, which also means dismantling the structural and social drivers of health inequities.
The American Medical Association (AMA), which marks the 175th anniversary of its founding in May 2022, helps propel the science and research that drives organized medicine forward through advocacy and innovation built around the world’s first-ever code of medical ethics. The AMA’s work to both standardize and modernize medical education and physician training are key elements in meeting its mission to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.
As not only an individual membership association, but the convening national body of medicine through its House of Delegates – comprised of more than 190 state and specialty medical societies and other critical stakeholders – the AMA is the nation’s largest and most influential medical organization. The policies adopted by the House of Delegates underpin its advocacy and guide ethical medical practice for millions of physicians in the U.S. and around the world.
Delegates selected by the state medical associations, medical specialty societies, national medical organizations and other recognized constituent associations that comprise the AMA House of Delegates meet twice each year to shape AMA policy and prioritize initiatives in medical education, ethical and judicial affairs, public health, diversity and inclusion, and a host of other subjects.
The Michigan State Medical Society has been proud to partner with the AMA over its own 156-year history, and it’s a collaboration that has yielded countless significant victories for Michigan’s providers and the patients they serve in recent years.
Chief among being the successful passage of prior authorization reform that was signed into law by Governor Whitmer earlier this Spring.
Led by MSMS, the Health Can’t Wait Coalition crafted and successfully advocated for the passage of legislation that puts an end to dangerous delays in patients accessing the care and treatment their physicians have prescribed by reforming the prior authorization practices insurance companies have traditionally used to slow—and sometimes deny— the delivery of lifesaving care. Thanks to MSMS, the AMA and the other members of the Health Can’t Wait Coalition, Michigan’s patients and providers will benefit tremendously from the fact that transparency, clinical validity, and fairness to patients will now all be factored into the prior authorization process. These reforms will help reduce wait times, streamline how physician offices and payers interact, and ultimately, improve access to care for Michigan’s patients.
The AMA and MSMS’s successful efforts to protect and preserve patient safety extend well beyond prior authorization reform. The organizations have partnered numerous times over the years to thwart dangerous scope of practice expansion. Most recently, MSMS was successful in securing substantial changes to legislation that would have allowed Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs) to practice anesthesia without supervision, input, or collaboration with a physician. As introduced, it would have greatly jeopardized patient health and safety. Thankfully, through resource support from the AMA and strong grassroots advocacy, MSMS was able to secure significant changes to the final-passed version of the bill to protect patients. Included in these changes is the requirement that a physician not only remain part of the patient care team, but is also immediately available when a procedure is taking place.
Since the earliest days of its founding, the AMA and its state and specialty medical association partners have put patients first – from our earliest efforts to protect the public from medical quackery and fraudulent “medicines” that were ineffective at best and life-threatening at worst. Over the years, we have spoken for physicians in a unified voice in championing vaccine safety and efficacy, confirming the harmful effects of tobacco use while helping ban smoking on airliners, and advocating for seat belts as standard equipment in vehicles, among other initiatives.
The AMA continues to fulfill its mission by working to remove obstacles to patient care, leading the charge to prevent chronic disease and confront public health crises, and driving the future of medicine through innovation and improved physician training and education.
While the AMA can be rightfully proud of its contributions to organized medicine, the organization has also owned up to the fact that some of its prior actions and policies helped create many of the disparities and inequities in health that persist today. The AMA has acknowledged these mistakes and is working collaboratively to eliminate inequities throughout health care in order to achieve optimal health for all.