Word: sores
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Widely criticized for its conservatism and its opposition to health-care legislation, the American Medical Association is accustomed to attacks from Congressmen, consumer advocates and others outside the organization. Now the A.M.A. is undergoing an attack from within. For the past couple of months, a source nicknamed "Sore Throat" (because of the similarity of his role to that of Watergate's still unidentified "Deep Throat") has been smuggling copies of confidential A.M.A. documents to federal officials and to newsmen around the country. This has been embarrassing the organization-already under study by the Postal Service and the Internal Revenue...
Last week the A.M.A. moved on its own to plug the leak. It hired a private security firm and gave lie detector tests to at least four employees. But even as the polygraph tests were being administered, Sore Throat was passing along to TIME copies of memoranda showing how the A.M.A.'s Washington lobbyists requested funds for politicians from AMPAC, the organization's political action committee. He also explained how the money made its way circuitously from Chicago to the coffers of those Congressmen whose favor the A.M.A., which cannot legally make direct political contributions, is interested...
...Sore Throat described the system, until at least two months ago the lobbyists made their requests for political contributions to the A.M.A.'s Washington office, which approved them and passed them along to AMPAC in Chicago. When they were approved, AMPAC sent the checks, made out to the Physicians' Committee for Good Government of the District of Columbia, back to the A.M.A.'s Washington office. The committee then wrote a check from its own account and passed it along to the lobbyist to give to the Senator or Representative for whom it was intended...
Mystery Man. Sore Throat's disclosure of these operations was merely the latest in a series of revelations about the A.M.A. One previously leaked set of documents described the A.M.A.'s efforts to assure that doctors who shared its political philosophy were appointed to federal advisory panels. Another set revealed how the A.M.A.-which publicly asserts its independence of the nation's $8.4 billion-a-year pharmaceutical industry-decided to permit representatives of drug companies in its scientific policymaking body. A third packet told how the A.M.A. and the drug companies, which had earlier contributed...
...identity of the source of these leaks remains a mystery, even to those who have received his communications. Sore Throat claims that he is a doctor who worked in the A.M.A.'s Chicago office for about ten years. For most of this time, he says, he went along with the organization's policies. But in recent years he began agitating for reform. As a result, he says, he was given his walking papers when the A.M.A.'s combative new executive vice president, Dr. James Sammons, ordered a cutback of some 70 employees last spring. Now living...