Medicare and the end of racial segregation in healthcare

The story of how Medicare ended segregation in healthcare settings is a pretty remarkable one. Temple University Professor David Barton Smith's  The Power to Health: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America's Health Care System brings the events of 50 years ago to light.“In four months [government bureaucrats] transformed the nation’s hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions to our most integrated,”he writes. "A profound transformation, now taken for granted, happened almost overnight.”In the early 1960s healthcare was even more segregated than the economy as a whole. In Southern states there were separate hospitals for whites and blacks; there were separate waiting rooms in physician offices, with black patients seen last.The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in programs that received federal funds. But when Medicare was enacted in 1965, no one really took the provision seriously. After all, the Brown v. Board of Education decision a decade earlier had not led to rapid progress in school desegregation.And yet Wilbur Cohen and a small team from the Social Security Administration and Public Health Service put together rules that prevented hospitals that discriminated from receiving Medicare funding. Learning their lesson from the failure of Brown's "all deliberate speed" language, which had let school segregation fester, the team decided to enforce the rules from day 1.Since hospitals couldn't afford to forego Medicare, desegregation was achieved in a matter of months. Imagine that.

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—By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.