Open Letter to AMA: I quit

Emailed to the AMA Board:
I paid my Texas Medical Association dues for 2010 but will not renew my American Medical Association membership. I do not want to be counted as an AMA member.

I dropped my membership once before due to political moves by the leadership of the AMA. I rejoined hoping to work within the House of Medicine to influence policies of the AMA. I became more active in my TMA, the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, national meetings of the AMA and the American Academy of Family Physicians and accepted the Chairmanship of the Family Medicine Section of the Christian Medical Association.

This weekend, AMA President-Elect Wilson announced support for the Reid substitute and manager’s amendment, which dropped the effort to correct the “Sustainable Growth Rate” and does not even mention (much less achieve) tort reform. Instead, current language provides billions of dollars in special deals for Democrat Senators, support for payment for elective interventional abortion in healthy mothers and on healthy babies, and an expansion of Medicaid that threatens to bankrupt my State of Texas.

The AMA leadership have told us that they hoped to protect our patients and the practice of medicine in the final legislation, just as I had hoped to influence AMA policies by lending my name and paying my dues to them. I will no longer give the AMA my name or my money, since neither of us has achieved our goal.

Beverly B. Nuckols, MD
New Braunfels, Texas