I'd personally welcome having the choice to opt-out of the AMA rules any time we wanted to (and rely on my homeowners & PUP instead), but unfortunately "wishing it were so" doesn't seem to have changed reality yet

IMO, the main reason most of us need AMA membership (and why we therefore care to varying degrees about whether we risk losing that membership) is that the vast majority of the flying sites we want to use would be off-limits to us if we were not AMA members.

Some clubs have permitted their members to fly without AMA membership, but not many. The overhead of the club having to check each member's home-ownership insurance status can be significant ; other schemes such as dual AMA/SFA use of a given facility have been tried with limited success (and some such as my old club have met with bullying from the AMA to try to force them to return to AMA-only status).

Lastly - not everyone DOES put a lot of energy into following the AMA rules. You can bust a whole lot of rules without getting penalised, just like you can drive over the speed limit a lot of the time without getting penalised. That doesn't mean that the AMA can't decide to inflict their stated punishment options, any more than my lack of speeding tickets means that the CHP can't pull me over tomorrow and hammer me for driving the exact same speed as I drove past a CHP car yesterday.

My point in highlighting the AMA's position / threat of potential membership withdrawal is not to try to be the guy who's keeping everyone in line ; instead I simply want to ensure that when people ask things like "Is it OK to bust the AMA rules as long as I don't care about having AMA insurance coverage for those few flights", that they are aware of the AMA's position on potential punishments and can therefore make reasonably educated decisions rather than being fed misinformation that "it's OK - the AMA can't do anything".

Gordon