California Medical Association

Box 11708, Berkeley, California.

I'm a member of the American Psychiatric Association, the California Medical Association, the Northern California Psychiatric Association, the Board of Medical Examiners for the Superior Court of San Francisco, California.

I'm also a member of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, as well as a member of the American College of Forensic Psychiatrists.

I received my bachelor's degree from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1969.

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California Medical Association.

Like, they're saying it's, it's, it's vague, it's not structured well, it's not a, a long-term fix.

Um, you know, education groups are freaking out because they say this really isn't funding education.

And so I worked at the...

California Medical Association after college is like kind of a paralegal work role.

And so kind of bridge, you know, I think what the theme that I, when I think about those sort of early parts of my becoming an adult, like there's, you know, healthcare that I was interested in, there's sort of public service element of it and trying to kind of think about it in the context of institutions as well.

How do people navigate inside of these institutions? So I applied to law school and I got in and then I decided I didn't want to go to school with people who wanted to be lawyers.

So what's being done on a policy level and what should be done from a policy standpoint?

So what I, again, and this is just what I know based on my involvement with the California Society of Anesthesiology and the California Medical Association, and I know as a result also the AMA to some degree, I think there's continued work and advocacy for improved payment and improved conditions for physicians in particular.

I know the physician rules.

I don't really know what's happening kind of at other levels, but I know there's this constant back and forth in Congress, both at the national level and then in local states to get improved resources, improved improved finances, improved reimbursement for everybody, not just anesthesiologists, but for surgeons, for emergency room physicians, for primary care physicians.

And that part of it got launched in 1939 in California and is basically still the same system that we have today.

And one thing that's important that's worth noting about that is in the initial model of Blue Shield, it was launched by the California Medical Association and doctors, because again of this history of professional serenity, Doctors controlled the terms for this.

Part of that is how we've ended up maintaining this fee-for-service model where like doctors set the price for things.

That fee-for-service concept comes back to this and the whole point of maintaining that versus switching to like a, you know, like you just get paid for a certain number of patients or you just get paid per incident or paid per hour or something.

So they're going to set a standard of how much you have to spend on certain categories of your budget.

And this is so absurd that even our friends on the left, and I use friends lightly here, but Planned Parenthood, the California Medical Association, most state Democrats, all of the GOP, and even unions, tend to oppose this thing because they do not like the idea that nonprofit healthcare is going to become more expensive, more rare, and less able to meet the needs of the poor people for whom they're typically set up.

I don't include Planned Parenthood in there necessarily, but you get my point.

So I'm a no on 44, David.