Yesterday's News

Yesterday’s News 2026-10-25

Written by

sauer@technologists.com

in

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

The Hidden History of American Healthcare

Thom Hartmann:
The four months Medicare desegregated America

This past July, Medicare turned 61. Most Americans just think of it as the program that gave seniors inexpensive healthcare for the rest of their lives, but — unknown to most Americans — it was also the most successful racial integration program in the history of the United States. Sadly, the way that happened has been almost entirely scrubbed from our national memory.

As recently as 1964, Black Americans were routinely turned away from the majority of America’s hospitals. Even women in labor, even people bleeding from a car wreck, Black people were turned away, and on those rare occasions when they were admitted to a hospital they were segregated to wait in basement wards, sometimes for days, until all the white patients upstairs had been seen. The Louisiana Red Cross labeled its blood supply “White” and “Colored.”

Even though the Civil Rights Title VI outlawed this, the hospital industry ignored it. The American Hospital Association’s own magazine ran an article explaining that keeping the races apart “must be [a hospital’s] primary consideration.”

Enter a brilliant move by Lyndon Johnson and a handful of men at HEW and Social Security: they wrote the Medicare Act in a way that prevented even one dollar of Medicare funds to go to any hospital that wasn’t in compliance with the Civil Rights Act.

Then they tipped off Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the (Black) National Medical Association, who recruited hundreds of Black volunteers to fan out across the country and try to get into hospitals. …

… Johnson held firm and refused to pay them anything at all if there was any proof whatsoever they were still engaging in racial discrimination. And within an astounding 4 months, roughly 6,500 hospitals bent their knees and medicine went from being America’s most segregated institutions to its most integrated.
(Thom Hartmann   more…)

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