The CMA
In 1992 Steve Thompson, who had served as Assembly Speaker Willie Brown's chief of staff and the head of the Assembly Office of Research, had moved to the CMA to become its vice president and head lobbyist. This job change put him in a powerful position from which to continue to advocate for the diversions out of the Health Education Account into CHDP, a program he had helped design years earlier while working for Brown. Brown and the tobacco industry were both interested in shifting Health Education and Research monies into other programs.
The CMA continued to portray its position as a painful choice between taking care of poor children and funding prevention programs that have a longer-term benefit. In the end, of course, providing money
The medical interests and counties warned the ALA that they intended to pursue a four-fifths vote in the Legislature to divert the Health Education and Research money into medical programs. In a private meeting hosted by the County Supervisors' Association, the CMA, the CAHHS, and the Western Center for Law and Poverty, among others, informed ALA and Miller that passage by a four-fifths majority vote would occur and threatened that, if the voluntaries did not accept the terms they offered, the health community would take the entire Education and Research Accounts. Najera and Miller refused and promised there would be “blood on the walls.”[3]
Whereas the Health Education Account had been under siege in previous authorization battles, the Research Account had been reasonably well protected. But in 1994 the CMA had the Research Account in its sights. Among other things, the program had funded studies on campaign contributions by the tobacco industry to members of the California Legislature as well as an analysis of the implementation of Proposition 99 highlighted the pattern of diversions of funds. This work angered Willie Brown, who demanded that the University of California stop this work.[45][46] Soon after the university refused, the CMA began attacking the Research Account as a waste of money and agitating to use the money for medical services.
Elizabeth McNeil, one of the CMA lobbyists, said that the CMA had neither prepared nor circulated the hit list of Health Education and Research
Research by far got the most criticism and they didn't do a good job at defending themselves…and they [the Conference Committee] took those dollars to balance the budget basically and fund some kids' health programs that I have to say are very worthy. And that was a tough call, but we did support the overall dynamics because of the political pressures on getting the budget and with budget deficits and the importance that we place on some of these indigent programs and when there was some frivolous research projects going on perhaps. …We really didn't support that shift being made, but in the end we supported the whole deal, felt like it was the best compromise we were going to get.[7]
Steve Scott of the California Journal reported, however, that he got the list from the CMA. More important, he saw CMA's support of the diversions as important to getting them through the Legislature:
The California Medical Association got successively more brazen in its approach and its willingness to kind of undermine the tenets of the education fund. I remember in the Conference Committee meetings on [AB] 816, Assemblyman Isenberg started rolling out the horror stories about the Research Account and how the Research Account was being used for these…ridiculous grants. And I got a list of those ridiculous grants from the California Medical Association. It was leaked to me through the CMA. …You talk to their lobbyist and she'll deny that they were openly advocating the diversions, that it was an unfortunate necessity that they had to agree to the diversions to make the tradeoff. But in truth they were right in there pitching subtly on the whole question of, and not so subtly, increasingly less subtly, on the issue of the problems with the Research Account. …So a lot of the pushing against the Research and Education Account, or in favor of more money going to direct medical services, was coming from the California Medical Association.[47]
In addition to attacking the Research Account, a May 1994 CMA report justified the use of Health Education Account monies for CHDP “due to the anti-smoking education component of the program.”[29] It reported that the administration offered “education representatives” a compromise—capping CHDP at $30 million a year—but were turned down. The report comments that some “questionable `education' projects,” such as anti-tobacco sponsorship of a ski program ($175,000), a race car ($200,000), and a high school rap contest ($175,000), led “many” conferees to believe that there was adequate funding of both the Health Education Account and CHDP. The projects that the CSR and the CMA used as examples of frivolous expenditures were some of the most innovative programs spawned by Proposition 99.[28][29]
Physician Roger Kennedy, a CMA member who worked throughout the nineties to get the CMA to support health education and the chair of Santa Clara County's tobacco control coalition, believed that the doctors had talked themselves into a bad position:
When the diversions occurred, I had a number of discussions with some very highly responsible people that I respect and have known for a long time…people who were in significant roles, people on the board, who were of the view that this money was so crucial to provide care for the kids in California. …But I think they fooled themselves into thinking that they couldn't take care of kids without this money. …This allowed them to overlook the fact that AIM program was, by everybody's analysis, extremely inefficient and was money that could have been covered in another way; MediCal would have been a much better way.[48]
Kennedy believed that the CMA should have been willing to call Wilson's bluff and saw two key reasons for the CMA's unwillingness to spend political capital on this issue. First, the CMA needed the governor's support on other important matters and did not want to alienate him on this issue. According to Kennedy, “It was the easier path to go that didn't require pushing Wilson and angering Wilson. The CMA leadership wanted to work with Wilson on other issues, and they felt that to push him on this would compromise their ability to work with him. At this point, he really had his heels just dug in. So they felt he wouldn't move on this or, if they forced him to move on this, it would harm them in other ways.”[48] Second, the CMA gives priority to the pocketbook issues of its members. As Kennedy explained, “The CMA has already been in trouble for a number of years in terms of membership because doctors' incomes are dropping and they don't see the value. So if the CMA isn't using its political clout to ward off the optometrists and instead is going along with making sure that the money from Prop 99 goes to fund tobacco education instead going into doctors' pockets, the CMA is going to look like they're not really supporting their members.”[48] Thus it was in the CMA's interests to support the same agenda that the tobacco industry had: further diversions of Proposition 99 anti-tobacco Health Education and Research money into medical services.