Susan Bailey, M.D., the new president of the American Medical Association (AMA), called for physicians to advocate at the highest levels of government and insurance companies for support needed "to sustain private practice during a pandemic that threatens its very survival."
Bailey, an allergist from Fort Worth, Texas, was sworn in as president of the nation's largest physician organization over the weekend. She called herself a "passionate defender of the independent physician."
"Like the AMA, I'm determined to remove all those obstacles that have come between us and our patients—insurer and government mandates, decreasing payments and increasing demands, burnout and physician suicide," Bailey said in a virtual inaugural address. "The coronavirus pandemic has made all of these problems more acute."
She takes the reins among a historic public health crisis as physicians practices grapple with plummeting volumes of business due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many practices had to furlough or layoff staff in recent months.
"Taking good care of our patients requires much more than the time we spend with a patient in the exam room," Bailey said. "It requires advocacy at the highest levels to fight against the quagmire of regulation and for the support we need to sustain private practice during a pandemic that threatens its very survival. It requires us to confront insurance companies and all their familiar tricks that seem to raise insurance premiums year after year without spending a dime more on patient care."
RELATED: Making history: Harris is the first African American woman elected president of the AMA
Bailey succeeds Patrice Harris, M.D., a psychiatrist from Atlanta, who was the AMA's first African American woman to hold the position. She is the third consecutive woman to hold the office. Barbara McAneny, M.D., a board-certified medical oncologist/hematologist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, held the position in the year prior to Harris.
In her farewell address, also delivered virtually, Harris reflected on the challenges facing physicians in the last year in both the wake of closures of medical practices in the midst of the pandemic and the increased national consciousness of racial disparities and police brutality.
"Our country, indeed our world, is being challenged as never before," Harris said.
Those challenge include pure lack of resources such as personal protective equipment to tackling institutional racism that has created a national public health amid a highly polarized political climate and an environment where misinformation spread rampantly.
Harris said AMA physicians have played a critical role in pushing for scientifically based, credible information and advocating for physicians to be able to speak freely without fear of retribution. "It is up to us, America's physicians and the AMA, to demonstrate how to understand more and to fear less. To be the voices our country can trust in this time of trial and to lead on action to move us forward in this difficult perilous time," Harris said.
As Bailey took on her new role, Gerald Harmon, M.D., a family physician from Pawleys Island, South Carolina, was elected as the new AMA president-elect.
Harmon will become AMA president in June 2021.
The new chair of the AMA board of trustees is Russ Kridel, M.D., a facial plastic surgeon from Houston. Bobby Mukkamala, M.D., an otolaryngologist from Flint, Michigan, is the new chair-elect of the board of trustees.
The other executive committee members on the AMA board of trustees for 2020-21 include Jesse Ehrenfeld, M.D., an anesthesiologist from Nashville, Tennessee, who is immediate past chair. Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, M.D., an internist from Atlanta, is the board secretary, and Bruce Scott, M.D., an otolaryngologist from Louisville, Kentucky, is the speaker of the AMA House of Delegates.
The new or reelected members of the AMA board of trustees are:
- David Aizuss, M.D., an ophthalmologist from Los Angeles.
- Lisa Bohman Egbert, M.D., an obstetrician-gynecologist from Dayton, Ohio.
- Willarda Edwards, M.D., an internist from Baltimore.
- Ilse Levin, an internist and epidemiologist from Silver Spring, Maryland.
- Thomas Madejski, M.D., a geriatrician and palliative care specialist from Buffalo, New York.
- Blake Elizabeth Murphy, a medical student at the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago.
- Harris Pastides, president emeritus of the University of South Carolina from Folly Beach, South Carolina, the public member of the AMA Board.