Physicians are talking about ways to fight Medicare reimbursement cuts, greedy corporations' efforts to buy medical practices, and torrents of patient email.

Members of a American Medical Association House of Delegates committee considered two resolutions addressing inbox overload this week at the AMA's interim meeting in Orlando, Florida:

1. One resolution on the Chicago-based group's meeting agenda called for the AMA to "immediately collaborate with payers to seek adequate reimbursement for professional time answering questions on the patient portal not related to a recent visit."

2. A second resolution called for the AMA to develop more inbox management tools for member physicians, lobby for electronic health record tools that track how much time physicians spend managing their inboxes, and push to increase what payers pay for physicians answering email.

Under the current rules, answering email makes "extraordinary demands on physician time," and "physicians are burning out trying to keep up with this workload," according to the second resolution, which was proposed by AMA member physicians from Texas. "Physicians do not get credit in institutional metrics or compensation for addressing in-basket messages."
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Related: Patients can now request health care data online--possibly before a doctor sees it

The AMA appears to be on track to emphasize existing AMA guidelines that call for health insurers and health plans to pay physicians for their time rather than to set a new policy on physicians' work on patient messaging systems.

The AMA House of Delegates is also talking about ways to toughen existing policies condemning arrangements that let private equity firm owners or other corporate owners of medical practices interfere with the practice of medicine.

AMA leaders emphasized that they want to give state medical groups tools to defend state corporate ownership restrictions at the state level rather than risking the possibility that the federal government might barge into what has traditionally been an area that has traditionally been left in the hands of the states.

Another proposed AMA meeting resolution, which did not receive consideration at the in-person meeting, called for the creation a new type of nonprofit, member-owned, cooperative health plan could sell coverage in the employer plan market.

The Affordable Care Act created a CO-OP system that suffered a wave of failures. The author of the CO-OP resolution said that the ACA CO-OP program was poorly designed and that better-designed CO-OPs could do well.