Operation Coffee Cup was a campaign conducted by the

American Medical Association The American Medical Association (AMA) is a professional association and lobbying group of physicians and medical students. Founded in 1847, it is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Membership was approximately 240,000 in 2016. The AMA's sta ...

(AMA) during the late 1950s and early 1960s in opposition to the Democrats' plans to extend

Social Security Welfare, or commonly social welfare, is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specifical ...

to include health insurance for the elderly, later known as Medicare. As part of the plan, doctors' wives would organize coffee meetings in an attempt to convince acquaintances to write letters to

Congress A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...

opposing the program. The operation received support from Ronald Reagan, who in 1961 produced the LP record ''

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine ''Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine'' is a 1961 LP featuring the actor and future U.S. president Ronald Reagan. In this ten-minute recording, Reagan "criticized Social Security for ''supplanting'' private savings and warned th ...

'' for the AMA, outlining arguments against what he called

socialized medicine Socialized medicine is a term used in the United States to describe and discuss systems of universal health care—medical and hospital care for all by means of government regulation of health care and subsidies derived from taxation. Because of ...

. This record would be played at the coffee meetings.

Background

The AMA had long opposed any government-run or subsidized provision of health care. Dr. Morris Fishbein, the AMA's president, described the organization's attitude as early as 1939:

... all forms of security, compulsory security, even against old age and unemployment, represent a beginning invasion by the state into the personal life of the individual, represent a taking away of individual responsibility, a weakening of national caliber, a definite step toward either communism or totalitarianism.

As John F. Kennedy took the presidency, one of his priorities was reform of the American health care system. To that end he sent a health care bill to Congress, HR 4222, known as the King-Anderson legislation after its sponsors (Senator Anderson and Rep. Cecil King, of California)."TexasBestGrok: Operation Coffeecup"
23 July 2004. Retrieved on 27 October 2014. The bill provisioned a significant expansion of the government's role in caring for the elderly, including features of what would eventually become Medicare.

References

* Max J. Skidmore: ''Social Security and Its Enemies'', Westview Press, 1999 {{reflist American Medical Association Healthcare reform in the United States Ronald Reagan Medicare and Medicaid (United States)