Despite an uprising of member doctors, the American Medical Association will continue to support a key tenet of the health care law that requires Americans to buy health insurance.
By a margin of 2 to 1, the AMA's policy-making House of Delegates voted Monday to continue to back the so-called "individual mandate," saying such individual responsibility for Americans who can afford to buy coverage was the best option to expand benefits to the uninsured. The results of the vote were 326 in favor and 165 opposed.
Without an individual mandate, supporters said, people will wait to buy health insurance until they are sick, and that would lead to a spike in premiums for all.
"The AMA's policy supporting individual responsibility has bipartisan roots, helps Americans get the care they need when they need it and ends cost shifting from those who are uninsured to those who are insured," said AMA president Dr. Cecil Wilson, a Winter Park, Fla. internist. '
"Important insurance market reforms, such as end to denials based on pre-existing conditions, are only possible by having broad participation in the health insurance market.
AMA delegates' action rejected efforts by dissident groups from within the nation's largest doctor group to snub a controversial part of legislation signed into law in March 2010 byPresidentBarack Obama.
Though the AMA vote has no force of law, it becomes part of the organization's national lobbying agenda in Washington. When health reform legislation was passed by Congress last year, AMA backing was seen as critical.
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