clipped from: www.truthout.org   
Among the darkest episodes was its opposition to free government-sponsored distribution of the Salk polio vaccine, which the AMA and its extremist allies regarded as yet another step toward socialism. That plan, too, was killed, depriving millions of children and adults of critical care during a national epidemic, in an act that amounted to a lobbying violation of the Hippocratic oath.

    It was a stealth effort, known as Operation Coffee Cup, that relied on doctors' wives to spread a propaganda message, taped by Ronald Reagan, among their friends and neighbors. As always, the rhetoric was hot. National health insurance would destroy "the sacred relationship between doctor and patient," and even "the sanctity of human personality." Doctors would be "regimented and made subordinate to the bureaucrat, and the people forced by law to accept such medical care as could be provided by a politically appointed bureaucrat."