Dr. Malcolm Todd, a former president of the American Medical Association who helped develop a precursor of the Medicare program, died Monday in Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. He was 87.
In the late 1940s, as a Navy consultant, he collaborated with Adm. Jimmy James in developing a program that provided medical care to service members’ dependents.
A longtime friend, Rhoda Weiss, a consultant to the medical center, said the program for military dependents served as a model when, in the 1950s, Dr. Todd advised U.S. officials on ways to provide health insurance to people 65 and older.
Weiss said Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson consulted Dr. Todd about plans for the Medicare program, which Johnson signed into law in 1965.
Dr. Todd also served as a personal physician to President Richard Nixon and accompanied him on political campaigns in the 1950s.
As president of the AMA in 1974 and 1975, Dr. Todd devoted much of his term to encouraging doctors to investigate unfit colleagues and to look for new policing mechanisms. Local medical societies, he said, often were “derelict in exercising their responsibilities.”
In a 1975 interview, Dr. Todd said: “Physicians have the responsibility to see that doctors are removed from practice where they are not meeting their colleagues’ standards. If we don’t stand up and take disciplinary action against such individuals, we’re subject to criticism that the public rightly throws at us.”
Addressing the AMA’s House of Delegates in 1974, he urged American doctors to fight any proposed national health programs.
In 1974, he led a 16-member delegation from the AMA on a three-week visit to China to observe noteworthy medical advances and methods of delivering medical care.
Dr. Todd was born in Carlyle, Ill., earned degrees from the University of Illinois and Northwestern University Medical School and was an Army surgeon in World War II.
