A SACRED TRUST

Back in 1964 Richard Harris gave an accounting of Estes Kefauver's investigation of the drug industry in The Real Voice. Here, with a commensurate and considerable expenditure of research, he examines the long, legislative, and anti-legislative activity which preceded the achievement of ""medical care...a basic human right"" certainly in a country whose people had not only been ""ill fed, ill housed"" but also ill. The fight went on for more than three decades from the time when the A.M.A., a monolithic obstruction in the body politic, determined to keep ""public health in private hands,"" spent fifty million dollars opposing what ultimately would result in Medicare. This traces the whole unhealthy history of A.M.A. political power ploys, first in the hands of that demagogic blowfish, Dr. Fishbein, then in those of a.p.r. organization, down through all the administrations and bills, submitted and defeated, on Capitol Hill. An almost antiseptically factual documentary, perhaps not for the general reader, but a very good job of its kind. Based on an earlier New Yorker appearance.