AMA: Good or Bad?

The American Medical Association is like a union for doctors.  The AMA is typically given the kind of respect that the public gives to doctors, but it is a lobbying organization that has always profited from selling its influence.  Its entire history, the AMA has behaved more like a greedy, for-profit corporation than like a public-interest group and it has promoted drugs and even tobacco in exchange for corporate cash. 

[T]he AMA eventually decided to sell advertising space for its medical journal JAMA to drug companies. Expanding on this business model, AMA President George Simmons decided to create the “AMA seal-of-approval” for favored drugs in 1899, resulting in a five-fold increase in advertising revenue by 1909. Simmons, it turned out, had no credible medical credentials and the AMA did no drug testing for the products given the seal-of-approval.
...Simmons’ focus on molding public opinion also became one of the greatest weapons of the AMA – his “Propaganda Department” would soon expand to communicate the AMA’s views through a column syndicated published in over 200 newspapers, a weekly radio program, and various books about how homeopathic practices and non-AMA approved drugs were “quackery.”
Through the 1930s to 1950s ...the tobacco industry leaned on the AMA to substantiate its dubious health claims. Beginning in 1933, JAMA published tobacco advertisements, stating that it had done so only “after careful consideration of the extent to which cigarettes were used by physicians in practice.” The tobacco industry became the AMA’s largest advertiser, and its implicit endorsement of tobacco products allowed companies like Camel to proclaim slogans such as, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”

...[Today the] AMA derives at least a fifth of its budget from drug companies through an arrangement known as “licensure.” The program consists of AMA selling drug companies its “Masterfile” of doctor profiles, spanning everything from detailed biographic information to an individual doctor’s prescription-writing history. The program is extremely controversial since drug companies in turn use the information to aggressively market their products to doctors. Controversial drugs Vioxx and Avandia, which have subsequently been found to pose significant risks to patients, have been marketed to doctors, in some cases, using information obtained from the AMA.
After an uproar in 2007, the AMA, through a policy of self-regulation, claimed to have stopped selling doctor prescription-writing information. But that pledge must be viewed with skepticism given the AMA’s track record.
During a Senate investigation of abuses of the licensure practice in 1990, the Boston Globe reported that AMA and PhRMA lobbyists came to Capitol Hill to promise Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) that the program was not part of any effort to convince doctors to prescribe PhRMA drugs. This promise to self-regulate was never kept. In 2001 the New York Times reported that the AMA generated $20 million dollars a year from licensure sales to drug companies in a complex scheme to market drugs like Baycol to doctors. In 2006, that number climbed to $40 million, and in 2007 it was reported to be $45 million.
So while the AMA projects an image of representing doctors ...it is actually financially tethered to the drug industry. Unless there are major structural changes to the AMA and its sources of revenue, it is difficult to view the group as an honest broker in the reform dialogue.

And when the AMA isn't promoting drugs for pay, it has been acting like a union that tries to raise the incomes of doctors at the expense of the rest of society. It also has its good side, but that is usually all the public thinks about it.