The serpent on the staff

the long version

The American Medical Association has played a key role during the past century in defining what health care is and how it is delivered in the United States. Now, as the nation tackles reform of the inefficient, costly, and often inaccessible health-care system that the AMA helped build, this powerful doctors' lobby once again is asserting its influence. In The Serpent on the Staff, award-winning Chicago Sun-Times reporters Howard Wolinsky and Tom Brune present a critical dissection of the AMA, issue by issue, showing how the nation's best-known physicians organization has time and again acted more as protector of doctors' wealth than as guardian of the public's health. For the past decade Wolinsky has covered the AMA more aggressively than any other reporter in the country. In 1989 he teamed up with investigative reporter Brune to expose a financial scandal that led to the resignation of the AMA's chief executive. Based on years of interviews and painstaking research into private and government files and internal AMA documents, The Serpent on the Staff reveals an array of disquieting decisions and public positions taken by the AMA: how it spends millions of dollars to influence politicians and sway public opinion to stall health-care reform; how it succeeded in turning Medicare into a financial windfall for doctors, and how it fights to keep it that way; how it delayed joining the crusade against smoking because of its long, close association with tobacco interests; how it attempts to block competing health professions, such as chiropractic and osteopathy in the past and nursing today; and how it fumbled the nation's public policy concerning AIDS.