"Sore Throat" Attacks

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 Service--and exposing it to the risk of congressional investigations. Says one A.M.A. official: "It is like death by a thousand cuts."

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 in currying.

As 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 $851,000 to AMPAC, joined forces to help kill 1970 legislation designed to provide patients with less expensive medicines. Other papers have linked the A.M.A. with the Nixon Administration's lobbying efforts on behalf of Supreme Court Nominee Clement F. Haynsworth Jr.

The 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 in Washington, but obviously in communication with friends at A.M.A. headquarters, Sore Throat denies that revenge is the reason for his revelations. What he seeks is change. "The A.M.A.," he told TIME Correspondent Marguerite Michaels, "is a health monopoly that caters to vested interests rather than devoting itself to the betterment of health care." Revealing its secrets, he hopes, "will lead to the formation of a new organization to do what the A.M.A. has stopped doing--promoting the science and art of medicine and the betterment of public health."

As a result of Sore Throat's leaks, Congressmen and Senators are talking of holding hearings on A.M.A. activities in order to determine whether they violate laws on political activities by corporations. The IRS also has for some time been trying to decide whether the A.M.A.'s activities should cost it its tax-exempt status, and the Postal Service is reviewing the A.M.A.'s second-class mailing privileges (along with those of other organizations). But the revelations have yet to force any visible changes in the organization's policies. Sammons remains firmly in charge and, despite growing disenchantment among younger physicians and an anticipated decline in membership, the A.M.A.'s opposition to any government interference in the practice of medicine or in the education of physicians remains unaltered. It is this intransigence, rather than Sore Throat's leaks, that may ultimately prove to be the A.M.A.'s undoing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.