How AMA 'Coffeecup' gave Reagan a boost

[marmar]

from SFGate:



How AMA 'Coffeecup' gave Reagan a boost
Richard Rapaport

Sunday, June 21, 2009


It was a courageous President Obama who last week put himself in front of the lions of the American Medical Association to talk about his proposals for universal health care. In a sense, Obama had no choice about the audience. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the AMA has been the gatekeeper for the kind of medicine that is practiced in America and, perhaps more important, the kind of medicine that is not.

This influence was never so evident as it was in 1961, when the AMA undertook Operation Coffeecup. This was a slick public relations effort undertaken by the AMA's Women's Auxiliary. The goal was to defeat legislation called King-Anderson, a congressional health care bill designed to assist older Americans that, in a watered-down version, ultimately came into being as Medicare.

While Operation Coffeecup did not murder Medicare, it did make the idea of government-supported health care exceptionally hazardous to your political health over the next five decades. It also helped launch the career of Ronald Reagan, the General Electric pitchman and aging movie actor from whose lips the epithet "socialized medicine" became a powerful weapon in his ultimately successful pursuit of the American presidency.

Operation Coffeecup was designed to enlist as many as 3,000 doctors' wives to arrange coffee klatches in the spring of 1961. Friends and neighbors would be invited to share coffee, and sponsors downplayed the subject matter as a benign, friendly, nonpartisan discussion of America health care issues. At the events, auxiliary members passed out brochures, answered questions, distributed pens, stamps and stationery and encouraged attendees to write letters - templates were made available - with which to inundate Congress and defeat King-Anderson. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/18/INME187IB0.DTL&type=printable