Replication Materials for \"Physician Activism in A Polarized Era: The opposition to the Price nomination\"

Although a substantial literature considers physician advocacy fundamental to medical professionalism, only a minority of physicians actually pursue it. We analyze the characteristics of physicians who engage in political advocacy by matching physicians identified in the NPI (all physicians) and PECOS (largely Medicare payment recipients) directories to publicly disclose campaign contributions and a list of 6,401 physicians who signed the Clinician Action Network’s 2016 petition objecting to the American Medical Association’s endorsement of the nomination of Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Contributions used to measure political preferences expressed on a liberal-conservative scale. We document a pronounced generational realignment in the politics of the medical profession, with recent graduates trending sharply Democratic. Petition signing vs. non-signing is responsive to gender, specialty, geographic location, personal liberal-conservative preferences and year of graduation from medical school. Of 241,000 NPI and 173,000 PECOS physicians making federal contributions at any point since 1979, petition signers more likely to be women (62% of signers versus 34% of non-signers), recent medical school graduates, (58% graduating since 1999 versus 42%) practicing in liberal zip codes, and not working in high-paying specialties such as surgery (4.3% surgeons versus 9.4%). The physicians who opposed the Price nomination were exceptionally young and female and tended to live in “blue” parts of the country. The changing face of physician advocacy has important implications for understanding how the medical profession will influence health care policy in coming decades.