Creating Equal Health Opportunity: How the Medical Civil Rights Movement and the Johnson Administration Desegregated U.S. Hospitals

Vanessa Burrows, Barbara Berney, Creating Equal Health Opportunity: How the Medical Civil Rights Movement and the Johnson Administration Desegregated U.S. Hospitals, Journal of American History, Volume 105, Issue 4, March 2019, Pages 885–911, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz004

Extract

“It used to be,” President Lyndon B. Johnson noted in 1966,

in many places in our land, that a sick man whose skin was dark was not only a second-class citizen, but a second-class patient. He went to the other door, he went to the other waiting room, he even went to the other hospital …. Under this administration's Medicare program, the hospital has only one waiting room, it has only one standard for black and white and brown, for all races, for all religions, for all faiths, for all regions. And I think that is a victory for all of us; that is a victory for America. The day of second-class treatment, the day of the second-class patrient is gone … good medical attention is the right of every American citizen. 1

Medicare revolutionized U.S. health care. By minimizing the burden of medical expenses for patients, it dramatically improved access and quality of care for millions of elderly Americans. And by attaching health benefits to senior citizenship, it made health care a basic civil right. But, often unrecognized is that Medicare also transformed health care by rooting out racial segregation in hospitals. Medicare was designed to pay for care for virtually every U.S. resident over the age of sixty-five, and, since older people get sick in disproportionate numbers—and before Medicare were largely uninsured—Medicare promised to represent about one-third of hospitals' revenue and approximately 10 percent of health care expenses nationwide. 2