[TheMercenary]

In a cameo in the White House briefing room yesterday, President Obama trumpeted the American Medical Association's endorsement of the House health-care plan. "These are men and women who know our health-care system best and have been watching this debate closely," he said of the doctors lobby.

Actually, what they've been watching is a formula that automatically cuts Medicare reimbursements to physicians—by 21.5% next year—and have made it clear that they'll endorse virtually anything, no matter how damaging to medicine, as a quid pro quo for eliminating this cut. They didn't get even that. Democrats amputated the "doc fix" from ObamaCare because preventing the cuts will cost more than $200 billion and pushes the price tag well above $1 trillion. They claim they'll instead pass a separate bill with the fix, adding all of that to the deficit.

President J. James Rohack was careful to note that the AMA was endorsing both bills as a package, and on a conference call with reporters he wouldn't say if he would pull support if ObamaCare passes and the doc fix doesn't. Yet that's what his political gullibility is likely to get his members. A Democratic revolt last month already killed the two-bill deception in the Senate in a sudden onset of fiscal sanity. In the stampede to pass ObamaCare, Democrats won't give even a passing thought to leaving the AMA behind—especially now, given that the group has shown how cheaply it can be bought.

Unmentioned by Mr. Obama was that 20 other physician groups came out against his health-care takeover yesterday, which they wrote "will threaten patient access and harm quality." Led by the American College of Surgeons, these doctors argued the Senate's bill "will do little to fix" health care's "underlying problems, and may make them worse." The letter was signed by groups representing neurological and orthopaedic surgeons, urologists, anesthesiologists, gynecological oncologists and others.

Mr. Rohack will also face an uprising among his own members at a meeting in Houston this weekend. But presumably Mr. Obama would say that all these men and women don't know our health-care system "best."

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