The Power to Heal

Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America's Health Care System

David Barton Smith

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780826521088
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Gesundheitspolitik

In less than four months, beginning with a staff of five, an obscure office buried deep within the federal bureaucracy transformed the nation's hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated. These powerful private institutions, which had for a half century selectively served people on the basis of race and wealth, began equally caring for all on the basis of need.The book draws the reader into the struggles of the unsung heroes of the transformation, black medical leaders whose stubborn courage helped shape the larger civil rights movement. They demanded an end to federal subsidization of discrimination in the form of Medicare payments to hospitals that embraced the "separate but equal" creed that shaped American life during the Jim Crow era. Faced with this pressure, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations tried to play a cautious chess game, but that game led to perhaps the biggest gamble in the history of domestic policy. Leaders secretly recruited volunteer federal employees to serve as inspectors, and an invisible army of hospital workers and civil rights activists to work as agents, making it impossible for hospitals to get Medicare dollars with mere paper compliance. These triumphs did not come without casualties, yet the story offers lessons and hope for realizing this transformational dream.

1

Formative Years

The patterns of medical practice and its financing in the United States developed between 1894 and 1954. Scientific advances, interest group clashes over power, and underlying social attitudes about race and class shaped its development. Just as early childhood experiences shape a person, so these early years shaped most of what continues to be distinctive about the American health care system.

During this period other industrialized nations, faced with the same rapid improvements in medicine, explored ways to best distribute its benefits. The historical narrative of these other nations said, in essence, “for all our differences we have a common identity, and, just as in any functional family, we look after each other.” The universal health insurance systems created in every other wealthy industrialized country became a way of expressing that common bond, the fundamental moral conclusion that no one should be denied needed medical care (see Reid 2010: 237–39).

That never happened in the United States (Hoffman 2012). Indeed, in terms of a national health care system, the United States produced the lone, stunted outlier. Its health care costs tower over other industrialized nations—more than twice the median per capita cost and twice the percentage of its gross domestic product are allocated to health care. Yet it has fewer physicians and hospital beds per capita, and its citizens receive fewer services (Squires 2011). The United States does poorly in comparison to other nations on most measures of health. For example, it ranks twenty-seventh out of thirty-four developed nations in life expectancy at birth (OECD 2014). About 16 percent of our citizens remain uninsured, and at least a similar percentage are underinsured, making any major medical expenses unaffordable (Majerol, Newkirk, and Garfield 2014, 4). As a result, people still go untreated and die, despite all the well-meaning patchwork arrangements worked out, because they can’t afford the care they need. Other industrialized nations don’t allow this to happen. What made the United States different?

The explanation offered by many and supported by some persuasive statistical evidence is that the US health system was, in essence, the “child” of the national equivalent of an abusive, dysfunctional family.¹ Its formative period of development, between 1896 and 1954, corresponded to the Jim Crow era—between the assertion of the legality of segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 [1896]) and the assertion that separate could never be equal (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 483 [1954]). That contradiction was first brought to public attention in Gunnar Myrdal’s influential book The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (Myrdal 1944). Indeed, the book was cited in the Brown decision. Myrdal was optimistic, arguing that the American creed of democracy and fairness would, in the long run, win out over segregation and racism. Yet so much of the structure of all aspects of life in this nation was shaped in those formative years. In no area was this truer than in the structure of America’s health system. Those formative years produced all the peculiar characteristics of the nation’s health system and the ideological justification for these peculiarities. Just as with the child raised in an abusive dysfunctional family, it’s hard to undo the destructive effects of such a formative experience. This book tells of the struggle to do just that. That struggle was a national one and not one limited to the boundaries of the Jim Crow South. The forms it would take in the North would be different but the outcomes much the same. I have chosen to focus on Chicago to illustrate this throughout the remainder of the book, but most other northern cities could have served this purpose just as well.

Race, indeed, has always been a concealed part of the logic of “American exceptionalism.” Simply creating anti-discriminatory laws or regulations or professing good intentions doesn’t change this. Race, and the logic of white supremacy, is hidden in the compromise patchwork solutions, the expansion of private insurance, the creation of producer cooperative solutions in the form of voluntary Blue Cross plans, the creation of the dominant voluntary hospital sector, the ideology of individualism, the opposition to public solutions, and the promotion of freedom of choice and free market solutions that have dominated, and continue to dominate, health care in the United States. All these policy choices have a disparate impact on blacks and other disadvantaged minority groups. The notion of “social solidarity,” invoked in other countries, never came up as an argument for universal protections in the United States. Only during the civil rights convulsions of the 1960s did the notion of “being all in it together” have any salience. Medicare, in its essence, was the gift of the civil rights struggle. Yet the patterns of thinking developed in those earlier formative years persist, most recently in the resistance to the implementation of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

The methods of imposing racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century differed in the North and South, but the underlying assumptions were the same. In the South, Jim Crow laws drew visible color lines reflecting the rigid caste system created during slavery. In the North, laws and customs created more invisible but just as effective color lines around black ghettos, insulating whites from the great wave of black migration to northern urban centers from the South during this period. In both, violence defended the color lines when other means failed. The degree of segregation in northern cities, such as Chicago, was equal to that of anywhere in the South. Thus, from the failure to address the aftermath of slavery, a regionally intertwined caste system emerged in the United States. That caste system was, in turn, reflected in the early organization and financing of its health system. Those who grew up or began their medical careers before the 1960s have vivid memories of how it all worked. There was nothing functional about it. Many spent the rest of their lives fighting to change it.

The Jim Crow South

The images of the Jim Crow South still shock. The abject poverty of rural blacks in the Deep South matched any in the underdeveloped world. Many still inhabited the antebellum slave shacks and were increasingly unemployed as a result of the growing mechanization of cotton farming. They lacked access to clean water, basic sanitation, and adequate nutrition, to say nothing of medical care. As a result, when in 1966 a federally supported Office of Economic Opportunity health center was finally set up in the Mississippi delta it proceeded to violate all the conventional boundaries of medical practice.

In the absence of any other resources, whenever we saw a child suffering this combination of infection and malnutrition, we wrote prescriptions for food. . . . Not just for the sick child, but for all the children in the family, because we understood that no mother was going to feed one child while the rest of her children went hungry. And we gave these prescriptions, these food orders to the people that needed them, and worked out a system under which they could go to the black grocery stores in any of the 10 towns in our service area and the grocery store would fill the prescription for food and send the bill to our health center. We paid those bills from the health center’s pharmacy budget.

The state of Mississippi found out about this and concluded that, clearly, Soviet communism had arrived in the Delta. They complained to our funder in the federal government, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the War on Poverty. And OEO officials came down to see us—so upset that they were practically babbling, steam coming out of their ears, saying, “What in God’s name did we think we were doing?” We said, “What’s the matter?” They said, “Well, you can’t give away food and charge it to the pharmacy at the health center.” We said, “Why not?” They said, “Because the pharmacy at the health center is for drugs for the treatment of disease.” And we said, “Well, the last time we looked in the book, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.” (Geiger 2005, 7)²

In the small towns, the end of paved roads and lack of street lights marked the “colored” sections, even without the pervasive signs separating whites and blacks. Larger, more affluent towns included a separate business district with the full complement of stores and services—pharmacies, medical and legal offices, and even hospitals. Perhaps most important, these neighborhoods included a growing black middle class, increasingly impatient with the existing order.

Success, in spite of the restrictions of Jim Crow, however, produced white resentment and sometimes violent retaliation.

My father’s family came from Georgia, where they owned a farm. The story goes that in the 1920’s, a neighboring white plantation owner wanted the land, but my granddad refused to sell it. I guess the plantation owner got angry, and the Klan came the next night, grabbed two of my grandmother’s brothers and lynched them. My grandfather returned, killed the plantation owner, and escaped. My grand mom and her kids had to also escape to avoid retaliation. They ended up in Greenville, South Carolina, and my grand mom took in washing. She never saw her husband again, but they never caught him either. He ended up in the Winston-Salem area living under an assumed name. Every once in a while, she’d get word passed along about him. There was an underground thing, an understanding that you helped other blacks who got in trouble. That’s how my grandmother was able to move. (qtd. in Smith 1999, 9–10)

Perhaps, in essence, the Underground Railroad didn’t disappear after emancipation. A modified version of it at the beginning of the twentieth century facilitated the Great Migration. Black newspapers in Chicago and other northern cities provided the travel guides, and Pullman porters on routes to Chicago and other northern cities from the South served as its conductors. Most of the lynching and other violence that propelled the exodus stemmed from growing tensions in competing for a living rather than mob retribution for sexual offenses against white women (Olzak and Shanahan 2003; Olzak 1992). Altogether twelve hundred blacks were lynched at the hands of whites in the South between 1882 and 1930, ranging from gruesome mass public spectacles to secret executions at the hands of a few whose motives were left a mystery (Stovel 2001, 844).

The organization of health services reflected all the divisions of the caste system. In the rural areas and small towns white hospitals either excluded blacks altogether or relegated them to a few beds in a colored ward. Only in the larger, more prosperous cities did the peculiar nature of the system bear all its strange fruit—hospitals for the indigent, for private pay black patients, for private pay whites, and for Catholic and Protestant sects, all erected in the center of town a few blocks from each other for the convenience of physicians whose practices crossed the boundaries of race, class, and religion. Typically black physicians were excluded from providing care for their patients at most of these hospitals, with the possible exception of the black hospital and colored ward of the county or city hospitals serving the indigent.

Jim Crow rules forced daily rituals of public degradation whether receiving or providing medical care, shopping, or traveling. A neurosurgeon in Greensboro, North Carolina, growing up in an insulated, privileged white world, recalled his first exposure to it. “The best friend I had growing up was a black individual. We did everything together. Just after I turned 16 and could drive we went duck hunting along the North Carolina coast. I could not take him into any restaurant. We couldn’t sleep in any lodges and I had to carry food out to him and we slept in the car. It had never hit me before. I became inflamed. I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t fair.”³

Some southern communities lacked any of the civility that made such youthful friendships possible. In the 1930s, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, tried to keep blacks out of its downtown. They arrested and used them as convict labor if they couldn’t pay stiff fines for loitering. White youths in Fort Lauderdale served as vigilante enforcers. In 1937, a young black man was shot in the abdomen by a gang of white youth intent on enforcing this ban. The two hospitals in Fort Lauderdale refused to admit him, and he died before he could be transported to one of the only black hospitals in South Florida in Miami (Oliver 1985).

The incident galvanized the black community and led to the creation of a thirty-five-bed cottage hospital in Fort Lauderdale. As many as five hundred such black hospitals were created during this formative era, in response to similar exclusions (Wesley 2010). About three-quarters of these facilities were in the South. While many white hospitals provided limited accommodation to black patients in a separate “colored ward,” black physicians were typically excluded. Their needs for a workshop helped stimulate the creation of many of these facilities, some privately owned by the doctors themselves. Black hospitals also served as the only places where black nurses could be trained and black physicians could receive postgraduate internship and residency experiences. In spite of these self-help efforts, finding a close-by hospital that would admit a critically injured black patient added to the risks blacks faced in traveling in the South.

Charles Drew’s death became a potent symbol of the problem of hospital segregation in the South.⁴ A black physician and researcher, he had done pioneer work in storing and transporting blood plasma for shipment to British troops in the early stages of World War II. The American Red Cross in 1941, in spite of the war, chose to refuse black donors. After protests, it agreed to collect blood from blacks but only on a segregated basis. That blood donations of the person whose work had contributed to supplying plasma to save the lives of soldiers fighting Nazi Germany would be subjected to such discrimination made Drew the symbol of a national protest against the Red Cross’s policies. Drew’s subsequent career in medicine was similarly restricted. He became chairman of surgery at Howard University’s School of Medicine and Freedman’s Hospital (the oldest black hospital, established in 1862, and the only surviving remnant of federal Reconstruction efforts after the Civil War). Because of his race, Drew could not join the local chapter of the American Medical Association and thus be eligible for privileges at any of the other hospitals in the Washington, DC, area.

On the night of April 1, 1950, Drew drove with three colleagues from Washington, DC, en route to a black medical conference in Tuskegee, Alabama. Charles Watts, a student of Drew’s at Howard, had driven ahead to find accommodations in Atlanta for the following night. “During those times it was not easy to find places for black people [to spend the night]. We were going to stay at the Y in Atlanta” (qtd. in Love 1996, 15). At 7:30 a.m., near the rural community of Pleasant Grove, North Carolina, Drew dozed off at the wheel, and the car swerved off the road at high speed, fatally injuring him. He was brought by ambulance to Alamance General Hospital, a forty-eight-bed facility five miles away. The county’s three black doctors were excluded from privileges, and only five of its forty-eight beds were allocated to blacks in a basement ward. Drew expired, less than an hour later, in spite of the best efforts of the white medical staff, who had learned who he was. High school and undergraduate classmate and colleague Montague Cobb served as a pallbearer at the funeral and as the key leader in the national struggle to desegregate hospitals that soon followed.

The myth, widely circulated after Drew’s death, was that because of his race he was denied treatment and a transfusion that could have saved his life. It was a powerful parable, not true in Drew’s case, but true in others. Indeed, eight months after Drew’s death, Maltheus Avery, a veteran and North Carolina A&T College student in Greensboro, had an accident in the same location and was transported to the same hospital. He was then transferred to Duke University Hospital in Durham, where its neurosurgeons could treat him for his head trauma and stop the swelling that would be fatal. Duke, however, had only fifteen beds available on their colored ward, and they were all, apparently, full. Avery was, as a consequence, transferred to Lincoln, the black hospital in Durham, and died minutes after his arrival. Durham’s black newspaper concluded that he was another victim of “the carefully guarded segregation law of North Carolina that prohibited him being placed in any other space than that allotted for his race” (qtd. in Love 1996, 221). Duke University Hospital never publicly acknowledged that the segregation of its facility had caused the transfer. However, Duke’s chairman of the Department of Medicine at that time, later reflecting about the hospital’s policies, explained, “If there was no black bed available and if there were beds in the white service, he was sent somewhere else. Nobody sweated over it. It was just the era of segregated restaurants and toilets. It happened every day and some were bound to die” (qtd. in Love 1996, 224).

The Southern Conference Educational Fund published a report, The Untouchables: The Meaning of Segregation in Hospitals, in 1952. It described twelve cases, including Avery’s, that led to death from being turned away from white hospitals whose black units were full or who refused all black admissions, including some in the North (Maund 1952). The cases took place over a twenty year period. Such events, or at least ones that would come to the attention of the media and be included in such a report, were rare for two reasons. First, at least in the South, the rules about where one could seek care or where ambulances would take you were clear. Only middle- and upper-class blacks with financial resources and a family member faced with a life threatening emergency were likely to challenge these exclusionary practices. For example, in 1946, 87.1 percent of white births and 45.2 percent of black births in the United State took place in hospitals. In Mississippi, the differences were event starker with 69.3 percent of the white births but only 9.6 percent of the black births taking place in such a setting (Dent 1949). In Mississippi the bulk of the out-of-hospital black births were attended by lay midwives at home. Few had any recourse to hospitals in the event of the need for a C-section or other emergency requiring hospital surgical facilities. The disparities in maternal and infant mortality rates reflected these differences and were largely just taken for granted. Second, as acknowledged in the Southern Conference Report, the number of beds allocated for blacks and whites in relation to their numbers was roughly equivalent even though their quality was not.⁵ Only when the census of black patients was well above average were hospitals with segregated accommodatio...