Right now, companies like Uber can treat workers poorly -- apparently at a policy/organizational level even -- because the only thing they feel they have to fear is a bit of bad PR. No one has these workers' backs. HR is concerned with protecting the company. And the workers likely don't have the time, money nor stamina to fight a huge corporation with a lawsuit.
That's why workers need to band together to look out for one another. The deck is already stacked against them.
Doctors do not have professional organizations or unions representing them.
The AMA is frequently mis-cited by people not familiar with the industry as a union, but it's not one at all. Only 25% of doctors are members of the AMA (most of them only because they require licenses to CPT codes, which the AMA has a monopoly over) and the AMA does not advocate for physicians' interests.
In no meaningful sense does the AMA "represent" doctors at large.
The British Medical Association certainly claims to be a trade union.
https://www.bma.org.uk/about-us/bma-as-a-trade-union
And they have engaged in collective action - e.g. the junior doctors strike.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/01/what-you-nee...
As a student member of the AMA, I can attest that they aren't the most effective organization, but they do plenty to further physician interests.
I think what you're likely getting at is how heterogenous physician interests are considering each specialty.
The AMA sometimes does things that align with doctors' interests, but only incidentally. It's allegiance is to itself as an institution, not to doctors, and it will further its own interests over doctors' every time the two collide.
As one example listed upthread, they advocate increasing the supply of physicians to lower physician salaries, which is directly against doctors' interests but in line with their own. Similarly, their stranglehold over CPT codes undeniably harms physicians and places them under even more control of payers' interests, but because it provides the AMA with a monopoly stream of revenue, the AMA clutches to it.
> I think what you're likely getting at is how heterogenous physician interests are considering each specialty.
I wasn't, but incidentally, that's the exact problem that unions do have. The leadership has the incentive to throw minority group interests under the bus in order to appease the majority of its membership. Closed shops (the AMA would not be one) are the most ruthless, because the only alternative their members have is to find employment in another industry altogether.
That being said, maybe sticking with state organizations might be a more fruitful endeavor.
Additionally, while physicians are a heterogenous bunch, there are many issues that almost all physicians agree with. Use the AMA to collectively lobby for those, and stick to the specialty organizations to push for more individual issues.
Physicians seem to have collectively decided that there aren't enough of those to justify the drawbacks of unionizing.