Word: ama
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...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...
...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...
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...
Although more implicit than explicit, the AMA still nurtures a fear of too much federal control. Especially in the case of the scholarship grants the organization feels that political appointees will replace qualified medical students...
...AMA thinks that political interference would be the result of any government participation in the profession. But the bill explicitly states that "no officer, agency or department of the government shall influence the curriculum or choice of students...