n the labyrinthine world of American healthcare, few entities wield as much unchecked power as the American Medical Association (AMA). While the AMA positions itself as the voice of physicians, in reality it’s largely a government-sanctioned medical coding monopoly that extracts billions from the health care system and funnels it into leftist political advocacy supporting transgender pseudo-science, climate radicalism, and racial quotas in medical education and practice.
It’s an arrangement that is not only anti-competitive but profoundly unfair, compelling doctors and patients to subsidize agendas they may vehemently oppose. Now that the Department of Government Efficiency has taken a well-deserved axe to the leftist nonprofit network living off government largess and the Trump administration has brought corporate monopoly power into its focus, the government-generated monopoly providing AMA with its millions in advocacy dollars seems ripe for the picking.
AMA owns the rights to something called Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes — a standardized system of five-digit codes that describe every medical procedure from a routine check-up to complex surgeries. Developed and copyrighted by the AMA since the 1960s, these codes are mandatory for billing under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (more commonly known as HIPAA). No doctor, hospital, or insurer can process claims without them, creating a captive market where the AMA charges licensing fees to everyone in the chain — providers, software vendors, and payers.
Moreover, because the federal government mandates CPT use for Medicare and Medicaid, innovators and alternatives are effectively locked out. And being a government-granted monopoly is rich business. In 2023, the AMA raked in $308 million from CPT royalties — more than half its revenue — dwarfing membership dues, which now account for less than 10 percent of its income.
It would be one thing if the monopoly rents charged by the AMA added proportional value to the system. But it appears these revenues flow directly from America’s medical community into shameless left-wing advocacy. In 2023, the AMA passed resolutions denouncing state laws restricting the mutilation practices known as “gender affirming care” for children, framing such interventions as essential despite glaring evidence to the contrary. This is, of course, in keeping with its history of pushing a rabidly pro-abortion agenda.
The AMA — which holds enormous sway over medical school accreditation and curriculum — is also fully in favor of racial preferences in medical education and practice, coming out in “unequivocal opposition to legislation that would dissolve affirmative action or punish institutions for employing race-conscious admissions.” The organization has also labeled basic diagnostic tools like Body Mass Index to be tools of “racist exclusion.” In 2021 it issued a strategic plan to “embed racial justice and advance health equity” — rather than, say, address the opioid crisis killing all Americans at record levels, regardless of race — as a critical focus for American doctors.
Hellbound and Down 