Opinion: The AMA is not properly representing physicians
Billing codes are just one way the American Medical Association has strayed from its core mission.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda may get the headlines, but his plans as Health and Human Services secretary also include something that has gone largely overlooked: overhauling U.S. health care spending priorities, targeting the current procedural terminology (CPT) billing codes.
Developed by the American Medical Association, CPT codes provide a standard way to document medical services for billing. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services then assigns relative value units (RVUs) to each CPT code — largely based on annual recommendations from a multispecialty AMA advisory committee — to determine payment levels for each service. This reimbursement system often rewards specialty care and costly procedures like surgeries more generously than the primary care needed to improve population health. Many experts argue that Medicare’s current payment schedule inflates health care costs and steers would-be family physicians into higher-paying specialties by privileging procedures over preventative regimens, worsening the nation’s critical shortage of primary care doctors within an already widespread national physician shortage across all specialties.
