Guess what? The AMA doesn't care about you, either.

Who knew the American Medical Association was in the business of denying medical care to people? We knew insurance companies were--anyone who has seen the first 30 minutes of "Sicko"--the least controversial part of the movie, btw--can tell you that. But now the AMA is showing its true colors, and they are all shades of green. The New York Times is reporting that that supposedly august group is going to actively oppose Congressional passage of a health care bill that contains a public option. For those of you not paying close attention, the "public option" would be a government-owned non-profit insurance plan not unlike a "Medicare for all" (in most iterations), in that everyone can opt in to it regardless of age or condition (other details are hugely debated). In other words, it would create a new choice for Americans' when procuring health insurance. (For a great many Americans, it would be their only option, of course, because they have been shut out by for-profit insurers.)
The AMA, however, believes that health services should be "provided through private markets"--as if insurance was somehow a "health service"! More ridiculously, the AMA statement released to the Senate actually states that this new "public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans." Get that? Giving 100% of Americans a new choice will restrict choice. As if that bit of Orwellian doublespeak wasn't enough, the statement concludes nonsensically, "the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers."
Let's put this all together. A public plan that is so inexpensive to maintain that it would drive out private insurance companies from competing will at the same time lead to an explosion of costs. Uh huh. Makes perfect sense--if you are a lying scumbag degenerate. The reality is that insurance companies realize they have been scamming us for decades, and they are now squeezing all of their contacts in and out of government so as to quash the equitable idea that health care is a right, not a privilege, and that all Americans deserve to have access to it. That 30% of Americans who don't have insurance presently? They are our physically infirm, poor, and young. Arguing, as the AMA is doing on behalf of the deeply amoral insurance business, for the status quo on health care to be maintained is the same thing as telling these people that they are somehow not deserving of basic human rights. That is what is sick.