The American Medical Association voted Wednesday to retain in its leadership ranks the man who chaired the group’s board during the controversial Sunbeam endorsement scandal, rebuffing a reform candidate riding a significant wave of dissent.
Thomas Reardon beat back Raymond Scalettar for the post of president-elect, tallying 270 votes, or 58 percent of the AMA’s House of Delegates, to Scalettar’s 196, or 42 percent of the 466 delegates who cast ballots, several delegates confirmed. The AMA refuses to disclose its vote counts of its elections.
Reardon said the vote showed AMA members are confident in his leadership and approve of his stewardship of the AMA board through the Sunbeam affair by a “significant majority.”
But Scalettar supporters seemed confident Reardon and other AMA leaders received a strong message of their dissatisfaction from the 2 in 5 delegates who voted against him.
Typically, the organization-backed candidate faces little, if any, opposition.
After the vote was announced, members immediately closed ranks behind Reardon.
“Delegates will support him in the new role,” said Dr. Richard Geline, an Illinois delegate and orthopedist from Skokie. “We have a new president and we look forward to working with him.”
Reardon and other AMA board members have stood by an independent committee’s report that places much of the blame for the Sunbeam debacle on staff members.
The upheaval raised a national debate over whether an independent physician’s organization would ruin its credibility by putting its highly respected name up for sale.
The outcry led to the dismissal of former executive vice president Dr. P. John Seward and four other high-ranking administrators in the biggest crisis in the AMA’s 151-year history.
“Emotionally, we need to move on,” Reardon said. “We need to make a strong commitment to ethics.”
With Sunbeam becoming less important to AMA members who participated in this week’s annual meeting at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Reardon said he’s ready to take his message to the nearly 60 percent of the nation’s 525,000 physicians who have been alienated by the AMA and aren’t members.
“It’s also about finding out our relevancy to the physician population,” Reardon said.
Reardon, a family practice physician from Portland, Ore., will be president-elect for a year before beginning a one-year term as president next June. Both positions pay more than $200,000 a year.
Scalettar supporters said they did the best job they could considering they mounted an opposition campaign in less than two weeks.
“We’ve at least clearly sent a message of the serious concern many delegates have,” said Scalettar, a rheumatologist from Washington. “You can rest assured the AMA will have a tighter control of its operations and improve its advocacy.”
Reardon acknowledged he could feel the heat and spent the early part of this week shoring up his support.
“As I went on through the week, commitments became stronger,” Reardon said.
It was viewed by many delegates as a close race. Many thought the firing of Sunbeam Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Albert Dunlap earlier this week may have taken the wind out of the Scalettar campaign’s sails.
Many AMA leaders said Dunlap’s dismissal offers new hope for a settlement of Sunbeam’s $20 million breach-of-contract lawsuit because Dunlap was the driving force behind the litigation.
Sunbeam sued after the AMA backed away from an agreement to allow the manufacturer to use the AMA’s powerful name on its home health products.
The Sunbeam affair already has cost the AMA nearly $4 million in legal bills, internal committee reports and costs of other eliminated product deals.
“The only winners right now are the lawyers,” Scalettar said. “Time is wasting and their meters are running. It would be nice to put things behind us and help us close this sad chapter.”
Dr. Nancy Dickey, who was inaugurated Wednesday as the first woman AMA president, said the board has asked for a renewed push by AMA staff to reach a settlement with Sunbeam.
“We have left the door open to continued talks,” Dickey said.
With Dunlap out of the picture, the AMA is ready to talk with new executives at Sunbeam. “It’s important to make contact relatively early,” Dickey said. “We’ll contine to talk to new leaders.”
