Will the AMA buy Obama's healthcare plan? (OneNewsNow.com)

Will the AMA buy Obama's healthcare plan? (OneNewsNow.com)

A leading healthcare reform expert says President Obama's plan to put an additional 120 to 150 million Americans on a new government healthcare plan will be a tough sell today at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA).



Barack Obama will be addressing the AMA in Chicago, hoping to lessen its anxiety over his push for a public health insurance option. The nation's largest physician organization recently warned the Senate Finance Committee that a new government-run healthcare plan "threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans."

Former McCain healthcare adviser Grace Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, says the AMA's opposition poses a "significant" roadblock for Obama. She calls it "crazy" for the president to suggest his proposed $1.5-trillion healthcare plan should be exempt from the pay-as-you-go budget rules he is demanding Congress to enact.

"He goes up to Congress and literally shakes his finger at Congress and then safely says, 'You've got to stop spending so much money. Stop all this deficit spending.' Then he goes down to the White House and says, 'Well, that doesn't apply to healthcare. We can pass this health reform bill that's going to cost at least a trillion-and-a-half dollars over the next ten years,'" she notes. "And as we all know with government health programs, that will be a conservative estimate. And that that's not going to apply -- that they don't have to pay for this monstrosity? It is astonishing to me."

Turner doubts the American people will be able to tolerate a government-dominated healthcare system, yet she notes President Obama and congressional Democrats are poised to pass their universal healthcare plan within a just a few days this summer without any public debate.