Health Equity, Gun Violence Prevention Among Priorities for AMA’s New President

CHICAGO — Jack Resneck, Jr., MD, a dermatologist from San Rafael, California, was inaugurated here Tuesday as the 177th president of the American Medical Association (AMA).

Resneck began his inaugural address by admitting that initially he had had some trepidation about taking the position, given “so much pain and despair in the last 2 years, in the wake of this pandemic and a politically fractured country … Questions about whether we could collectively – all of us in organized medicine – move beyond the serious challenges we face. I wondered if I could make a difference.”

But then, he said, he heard a story from his rabbi, Stacy Friedman of Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael (who had given the invocation at the ceremony a few minutes before Resneck began speaking). The story was about Georgene Johnson, “a middle-aged woman from Cleveland, who, 30 years ago, took up jogging. Eager for a little competition, she signed up for a local 10k run.”

She showed up the morning of the race and began running with the crowd. However, “5 miles in, Georgene began to wonder why the course hadn’t doubled back towards the start as she expected,” Resneck said. “Confused, she asked an official, and discovered she was running the Cleveland Marathon. Her 10k was scheduled to commence an hour later.”

Although Georgene was upset, she couldn’t find anyone to give her a ride back to the starting area, so she just kept running, he said. “She thought to herself: ‘This isn’t the race I trained for. This isn’t the race I entered. But, for better or worse, this is the race I’m in.'” And she finished the marathon, in 4 hours and 8 minutes.

In a similar way, when many physicians joined the medical profession, “you probably didn’t anticipate shouldering the weight of a pandemic that has taken the lives of over a million Americans,” Resneck continued. “Or working in a healthcare system stretched so thin that at times physicians seemed to be the only thing holding it together – sometimes with duct tape.”

“You probably didn’t plan on insurers questioning every prescription, and every procedure you asked for,” he said. “Or government criminalizing routine and vital healthcare … enshrining discrimination against our LGBTQ+ patients … or attacking a woman’s right to control healthcare decisions that should only be between her and her doctor. No, this is not exactly the race we trained for. But this is the race we are in.”

Resneck praised the work of his fellow physicians in the face of the pandemic. “Who can forget the images of doctors sleeping in tents and garages to protect their families from exposure? Or traveling to New York, and the Navajo Nation, to help exhausted colleagues and desperate patients?”

He emphasized the Recovery Plan that the AMA was advocating for in order to help physicians. The plan “includes fixing a deeply flawed Medicare payment system that hasn’t seen a real inflation update in two decades … It includes removing the hurdles that health insurers and others create to deny high-quality, evidence-based care to patients,” hurdles like prior authorization.

Resneck also addressed the “scope of practice” issue, which he defined as “supporting team-based care, but not pretending that every healthcare practitioner has the same training and experience as physicians. Patient safety demands that we lift up physicians for their expertise, as leaders of healthcare teams,” he said.

Health equity was another topic of the evening. Resneck admitted that “the AMA has not always been on the right side of history. But we have enormous capacity to reduce harms and advance equity, and that begins with reckoning openly with our past mistakes — making space for healing and transformation.”

He lauded the work of the association’s Center for Health Equity, adding, “I’m optimistic because their efforts are not siloed, but are becoming embedded across AMA teams focused on medical education, advocacy, science, publishing, litigation, chronic disease, and innovation.”

Resneck said that growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, although his understanding of racism wasn’t very sophisticated, he realized that “some things I saw just weren’t right … I knew enough at age 16 to write an op-ed in our city’s newspaper about the need to remove Confederate monuments from our courthouse lawn. You can imagine how that went over in 1987.”

Resneck said it was the “nerdy part” of his personality “that is willing to go back to the drawing board with clever colleagues and staff to try again after failing to get a Congressional bill over the finish line, to fix Medicare payment, or lower drug prices, or ‘right-size’ prior auth, or expand patient access to care. It’s the part of me that won’t give up on our AMA efforts to stop the public health crisis of gun violence, demanding waiting periods, universal background checks, red flag laws, and bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines.”

He thanked his predecessors as well as his family and friends who were in attendance, and concluded, “We will always have doctors’ and patients’ backs. This may not be the race we entered. But this is the race we are in. And together … this is the race we will win.”

Earlier in the day, members of the AMA’s House of Delegates also elected their next president, Wisconsin anesthesiologist Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, currently a member of the AMA’s board of trustees. That election was marred by controversy when one of Ehrenfeld’s two opponents, Willarda Edwards, MD, of Baltimore, was accused of trading votes during the election campaign, a charge she vigorously denied.

Delegates also re-elected Scott Ferguson, MD, and Sandra Fryhofer, MD, to the board of trustees, and put two new members on the board — Marilyn Heine, MD, and Alexander Ding, MD.