BRASS TACKS

(This article, the first of three on the American Medical Association, describes the AMA's present political influence. Later articles will deal with the past record of the AMA and its current campaign against compulsory health insurance.)

"Who Runs America?" asks an eagle in 11,000 full-page ads this week. "The Congress? The President? OR YOU AND THE MAN NEXT DOOR?" The answer, at the bottom of the page: "You and Your Neighbor Run America!"

Flushed with power, the man next door might overlook some noisy partners: giant pressure groups that spend millions yearly to influence public representatives and the public mind. As it happens, the biggest lobby of them all is the very group paying out $1,110,000 on this "National Education Campaign"--the American Medical Association. Listed as "top spender" under the Lobby Registration Act, the AMA spread $2 million and 55 million propaganda leaflets last year in the fight against the President's national-health program. With the largest delegation and the most envied slush fund in Washington, organized medicine can outshout you and your neighbor combined, through the echo may not get beyond the committee room.

Lobbying arm of the AMA is the so-called National Physician's Committee for the Extension of Medical Care (NPC). Though it describes its activity as a "grass roots crusade," not one individual, physician or otherwise, appears on the required list of donors of more than $500. Instead there are the names of 29 corporations--virtually every large patent medicine and proprietary drug business in the country. Apparently, either the AMA "urged" these firms to contribute, or as Senator James Murray suggests, "Such companies fear a loss of customers when people will go to the doctor instead of a drug store."

During the first three months of this year, the National Physician's Committee spent an average of $10,000 a day in their eagerness to help run America. They got their money's worth. Under the 81st Congress, the AMA can boast the following achievements:

1. Blocked federal aid to medical schools ("danger of federal control"--although many schools need immediate support, and the AMA admits that the country will be short 15,000 doctors by 1960).

2. Blocked a bill for treatment of defects discovered by school medical examinations.

3. Fought federal aid to rural health plans ("socialized medicine") and to local public health units.

4. Killed expansion of social security benefits for the permanently disabled.

5. Blocked VA hospital service for soldiers' dependents.

So far this year the doctors have batted 1000, swinging against every important health bill to come before Congress. In the words of one "educational" pamphlet: "If this is 'lobbying,' it is lobbying in the finest American tradition."