AMA Wrestles With Unionizing

Frustrated by managed-care companies, hundreds of doctors opened the American Medical Assn.’s annual summer meeting in Chicago to debate the merits and risks of forming a labor union. At their winter meeting in December, the delegates asked AMA trustees to investigate collective bargaining, and the trustees responded with a 70-page report that served as a starting point for debate about what the AMA can do without violating antitrust laws. Only one of every seven U.S. physicians is an employee under the federal law’s definition. The AMA’s 494 delegates, who are representing about 290,000 doctors, or about one-third of U.S. physicians, began meeting Sunday for five days to set policy for the influential group. Delegates will vote later in the week on whether to adopt a specific policy on unionizing. The first order of business was the election of Dr. Randolph D. Smoak Jr., a surgeon from South Carolina, as their president-elect.