AMA is not a union, it's an association, akin to the National Association of Realtors, or even the "National Association of Photoshop Professionals." There are big differences between a professional association and a union. For starters, a Union would likely demand required overtime pay for the on-call shift, a cap of max hours worked, likely plenty more. I'm not in a position to judge whether those kinds of demands would be a positive or a negative, but it's a big example of a difference between a union and a professional association.
> The flaw is the AMA is just a union for doctors not a body that represents patients in any way.
Ergo, AMA is not a union, hence that cannot be a flaw in the AMA. Chastising the AMA for not representing patients because it is too busy being a doctors union is a straw-man argument.
One thing that a generic union has in common with the AMA specifically is that both only care about its members, not anyone else, and will vehemently argue in favor of things that enrich its members at the direct expense of everyone else.
The overlap of commonality does not mean a lot, a professional association is not a union, a union is not a professional association.
I think there is unstated subtext perhaps in your criticism. To one extent, a unions job is to care about its members. It is _not_ the unions job to care about anyone else. If the union acts in the interest of anyone other than its members, it is not doing its job. I think that criticism is more of a definition almost. The seamstress union was not created to care about the CEO and managers, but seamstresses.
It's hard to say a bit whether union benefits always do come at everyone else's expense. I'm reminded of the argument against $15 minimum wage. According to
one third of business owners in 2021, it was going to cause layoffs. [1] That did not happen in Seattle where that was tried, instead the data shows: “Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance appears to have delivered higher pay to experienced workers at the cost of reduced opportunity for the inexperienced,” [2] Despite the data, there is still the claim that mass layoffs would be necessary.
I think this perhaps dovetails into the debates of trickle-down (AKA supply side economics) vs bottom-up economics. Be what it may, not everything union is good, yet you can still thank them anytime you have a weekend. [3][4][5] I'm just saying, be cautious when painting with a broad brush. The idea a union helping its members will always be at everyone else's expense strikes me as an anti-union talking point rather than something grounded in firm data. Could be true, but without citation showing that to actually be extensively true, I do not take that statement at face value.
To be sure, the _only_ claim I'm making here is that a union and professional union are not the same thing. I'm super skeptical of all these other claims/statements being made and am not really willing to accept anything on face value here without evidence, particularly broad generalizations. The points I raise I think bring some refutation to those generalization, which does not mean the inverse is true, but simply that those generalizations are neither helpful nor informative.
edit fixed citation links, one was missing. Added more citations in support of claim that unions are to thank for the weekend (please correct my history if wrong, my point is that historically, in the concrete, unions have done some really good things [assuming you believe not working an average of 102 hours per week is a good thing as was the case for building tradesman in 1890 [5])
The AMA doesn't control the number of medical student slots either. They have no regulatory or accreditation authority. Medical schools are free to add more students, and several entire new medical schools have opened in the past few years.
The immediate bottleneck really is in residency programs. Every year, some students graduate with an MD/DO degree but are unable to practice medicine because they don't get matched to a residency program.
Exactly: I want to see more/newer data on residency programs and placement rates per resident (MD, DO, IMG), because last I checked, residency spots (and the bottleneck created by limited Medicare funding, which I find interesting considering the profit created by residents) were the primary bottleneck; medical schools have every incentive to open new spots as quickly as humanly possible considering the ludicrous pricing they charge. We're firmly into 'money printer' territory for medical schools and their cost of operation.
Politicians "trust the experts" and the American Medical Association says...
The flaw is the AMA is just a union for doctors not a body that represents patients in any way.