Physicians and heath insurance companies may sometimes seem at odds when it comes to finding solutions to healthcare. However the AMA has just launched a major advertising and public awareness campaign stressing the importance of affordable health insurance for all Americans.

The campaign is targeted to take place over the next three years. It is a major television, print and radio advertising effort by the AMA to draw the public’s attention to the growing number - now estimated at 47 million – of Americans without access to affordable medical coverage. The idea is to discuss all the basic issues involved in the health insurance reform movement, and of course to promote the AMA’s own health insurance for all proposal. Ads will intermittently focus on getting Americans to vote for candidates with serious health insurance reform ideas, and to put pressure on congress to enact healthcare insurance reform legislation.

The 30-second ads are extremely powerful and dramatic. They have been designed to show lack of health insurance is a problem that affects everybody, across socioeconomic lines. Beyond that the AMA wants to put a face on the problem of lack of affordable coverage, and make people and congress get back to seeing health insurance as the basic as human issue that it is.

In one particularly dramatic ad in the campaign for example, the camera pans a crowd and zeros in on one person in the crowd. The narrator says there are 1 in 7 people in the United States without health insurance, but one in seven is not just a statistic, it is a father with leukemia” In another spot the camera focuses on a woman alone at a bus stop looking forlorn and the copy says, “or it is a friend with depression”

The ads have been clearly structured to paint the AMA’s position. Tag lines in the TV spots and in print ads state 1 in7 without health insurance to the AMA this is not a statistic it’s a tragedy.