Public Health Fellowships

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"Lobbyist" is not a title of these doctors the Baltimore area would give herself, but glothes and beams are supporters of the biggest lobbying fight of the decade: the overhaul of American health care.

Members of Congress to develop a final product legislation were sensitive to efforts by members of the medical profession, who have been deeply involved for months. The other day, an aggressive lobbying campaign by doctors and hospital executives has been credited with blocking a key measure of the Senate health care, a proposal that would let Americans aged 55 and 65 buy in Medicare program.

A vote of Christmas in terms of reform of the Senate is now in sight. If, as expected, Democrats win, a conference committee of House and Senate to reconcile the different planes of the two chambers, which would then have to ratify every compromise.

The legislative deal-making will be strongly influenced by months of closed meetings between legislators and their staffs and the legion of lobbyists in Washington are traditional paid to advance the interests of their clients.

AARP, for example, is widely credited with helping to persuade lawmakers to add a provision that would fill the donut hole "in Medicare plans, at an estimated cost of at least $ 20 billion, some Democrats expect the pharmaceutical industry to pick up.

But one of the top lobbyists AARP, Nancy LeaMond, said that the most influential lawyers in the fight this year in health care are the ones who brought the tactics of political campaigning in the debate on care health.

For example, conservative opponents of the democracy initiative was able to fuel a kind of "forest fire," she said, "more than anything that affects the government." A well known example: the furor over questions of end of life, nourished by false rumors of government "signs of death," including members of Congress vibrated at their town hall meetings in August.

Glothes and beams differ sharply on how best to repair a system that everyone considers bad. Perhaps surprisingly, given their opposing views, they have more than one thing in common.

Idealistic and hardworking, they have grown up in local households connected to the activity of medicine. Somehow, everyone finds the time to adapt to political activism in a busy life as a full-time physician and mother of young children.

Beams, 37, a pediatrician from Ellicott City, trying to mobilize physicians - individuals are not normally given to political activism - on issues such as changing the way doctors are paid.

"Obviously, I can solve small problems here every day," she said in an interview at his office Columbia. "But I've always been interested in the bigger picture as well."

Last winter, she joined Physicians for America, an outgrowth of a group of doctors of the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The e-mail his personal contact list, ask friends to sign a petition doctors online has been designed to draw them into the political process. When more than 1,000 responses returned within 36 hours, the group gave him a leadership position. She is now an organization of physicians in Maryland and eight other states as deputy field.

"Legislators want to hear from us, and their staff want to hear from us," she said. "As doctors, we have an area of expertise and a kind of moral authority, and it is important to raise the voice in the political process."

She has led efforts to encourage physicians and medical students in communicating with legislators, by mail, phone or in person, and she went door to door in its complex of offices and the hospital to promote the plan democratic. She participated in a Rose Garden event with Obama, has been featured on PBS Hour "News" and MSNBC, and Appe.