Throughout America, medical societies in 1917 came out strongly against health insurance legislation, and the former close ties between the AMA and the AALL were severed by the AMA, as organized medicine now realized that it could successfully defeat efforts to pass federally funded medical insurance. State medical societies used the growing anti-German sentiment to warn the American public about the supposed evils of state health insurance. Even the federal government, through the propaganda activities of the Creel Committee on Public Information, claimed that the concept of state health insurance was a German doctrine that was a "fraud" against American workers.