Why the AMA favors

John Goodman writes:

People are fond of believing that the American Medical Association (AMA) represents physicians. But if representation follows revenues, the AMA’s most important customer is probably the federal government.

In1983, an agreement between the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) and the AMA made the AMA’s copyrighted Current Procedural Terminology codes (CPT) the sole coding system that could be used for billing Medicare.

The AMA used to get its money from membership dues, but now it gets $70M per year from CPT codes.

The 2001 codes are here. I don't see how a private company can claim to own some 5-digits used for Medicare billing.