The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System
On a Saturday morning in January 1967 Dr. Jean Cowsert was found shot to death in front of her home in Mobile, Alabama, after a stone had been thrown through her front window and she went out to investigate. Though police concluded that she had accidentally shot herself, in the months prior to her death Cowsert, a white physician allied in the struggle for civil rights, had been a key confidential informant to officials from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) concerning the Mobile Infirmary’s publicized efforts to thwart patient desegregation of its facilities. A HEW official’s carelessness may have inadvertently disclosed her identity to desegregation opponents.
Dr. Cowsert’s is one of many compelling stories in David Barton Smith’s powerful account of U.S. hospital desegregation in 1966, triggered by the convergence of national civil rights mobilization, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 enactment of Medicare. In The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System Smith tells how federal health officials—with backing from President Lyndon Johnson, HEW Secretary John Gardner, and other federal officials—mobilized to achieve a startlingly rapid transformation of America’s hospitals, erasing the stain of racial segregation that had always prevailed across the nation, North, South, East, and West.
Smith’s account stands in vivid contrast to the equally compelling and failed story of American public school desegregation, best told in the 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning Simple Justice: The History of Brown vs. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality by Richard Kluger. In that case, the 30-year struggle to overturn “separate but equal” racial segregation in public education, culminating in a landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, to this day has been mostly unachieved. A bold court decision was fatally undermined by a subsequent enforcement ruling committing the nation to an unsuccessful implementation strategy called “with all deliberate speed.” The contrast between successful desegregation of U.S. hospitals versus failed desegregation in public education is instructive.
Smith writes: “In four months, civil rights activists … transformed the nation’s hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions to our most integrated. In four years, they changed patterns of use of health services that had persisted for half a century. The fundamental moral imperative—that those needing medical care should receive it—began for the first time to reflect actual use of services. A profound transformation, now taken for granted, happened almost overnight.”
A bold court decision was fatally undermined by a subsequent enforcement ruling committing the nation to an unsuccessful implementation strategy called “with all deliberate speed.” The contrast between successful desegregation of U.S. hospitals versus failed desegregation in public education is instructive.
As with so many aspects of American society prior to the 1960s, segregation ruled. A 1952 report by the South Conference Education Fund titled “The Untouchables: The Meaning of Segregation in Hospitals” documented 12 deaths of African Americans denied admission to white-only hospitals governed by white physicians and white dominated medical associations. In most of the nation, black-only hospitals were under-staffed, under-financed, and under-equipped.
Beginning in the 1940s, black health professionals who were systematically excluded from the white medical mainstream, supplied backbone in the struggle for civil rights in hospitals, in schools and across American society. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, MD, Sonnie Wellington Hereford III MD, Reginald Hawkins DDS, W Montague Cobb MD PhD, Charles Watts MD, George Simkins Jr. DDS—these are long-forgotten names of physicians who stood up for justice in their communities and in courts.
Though the 1946 Hill-Burton Act banned racial discrimination in new and expanded hospitals for which it provided ample federal funds, the law explicitly sanctioned “separate but equal” facilities. A 1962 federal lawsuit, Simkins vs. Moses Cone, attacked the constitutionality of that provision, winning crucial support from the Kennedy Administration, and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in March 1964 just as Congress was passing that year’s landmark Civil Rights Act. That law’s Title VI, for the first time, prohibited using federal funds for racial segregation.
Passage of the bold 1964 law, though, was insufficient to compel hospital desegregation. The critical catalyst was the passage of Medicare in July 1965 providing many millions of dollars in payment for medical services for senior citizens for the first time. Though Title VI clearly applied, its remedies and enforcement powers were meager. The question became: Would President Lyndon Johnson enforce Title VI compliance in Medicare by blocking payments to racially segregated hospitals? An initial push for voluntary desegregation failed as surveys conducted by civil rights activists had proven in mid-1965.
With only six months until the July 1, 1966, inauguration of Medicare, “Gardner was launching perhaps the riskiest domestic policy initiative in the nation’s history. It tied together the fate of Johnson’s two signature pieces of legislation—the Civil Rights Act and Medicare,” Smith writes.
In December 1965, HEW Secretary Gardner distributed a memo declaring that Medicare compliance with Title VI “is too important to be treated as anything less than the highest of priorities in our total program,” committing staff and resources to the task. With only six months until the July 1, 1966, inauguration of Medicare, “Gardner was launching perhaps the riskiest domestic policy initiative in the nation’s history. It tied together the fate of Johnson’s two signature pieces of legislation—the Civil Rights Act and Medicare,” Smith writes.
The challenges were daunting. A January 1966 review concluded that at least two-thirds of Southern and border state hospitals were out of compliance, while many Northern hospitals operated as de facto segregated facilities.
Gardner’s team quickly concluded that success would require “no ‘all deliberate speed’ pass for hospitals wishing Medicare funds. No money should go to any facility where race played any role in the treatment of patients, employees, or medical staffs.” Compliance was handed to HEW’s Public Health Service managed by U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart and the new HEW Office of Equal Health Opportunity. But with months before Medicare’s rollout and more than 4,000 noncompliant hospitals, how could they achieve this seemingly impossible task?
When HEW leaders put out a call for volunteer temporary federal employee transfers to perform compliance, more than 1,000 employees, mostly from the Social Security Administration and the Public Health Service, answered yes. They included “bench scientists from NIH, veterinarians, pharmacists, managers of Social Security field offices, venereal disease investigators, even a ‘medical officer from the Indian Health Service complete with an Eskimo secretary.’”
The challenges were daunting. A January 1966 review concluded that at least two-thirds of Southern and border state hospitals were out of compliance, while many Northern hospitals operated as de facto segregated facilities. On March 4, 1966, Surgeon General Stewart sent a letter to all U.S. hospitals with this message: “To be eligible to receive Federal assistance or participate in any federally-assisted program a hospital must be in compliance with Title VI … Representatives from the Department of Health Education and Welfare Regional office will be visiting hospitals on a routing periodic basis …” Three weeks later, Dr. Martin Luther King offered his historic judgment: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
Smith provides many anecdotes of intransigent hospital officials who tried to hoodwink inspectors, concluding that “the vast majority of the hospitals chose to comply in order to get the Medicare payments, and it was remarkable how fast and dramatic the changes were.”
Smith provides many anecdotes of intransigent hospital officials who tried to hoodwink inspectors, concluding that “the vast majority of the hospitals chose to comply in order to get the Medicare payments, and it was remarkable how fast and dramatic the changes were.” Literally overnight, the blood supply from the Louisiana Red Cross Blood Bank, previously labeled “white” and “colored,” was integrated. At a June 15 White House meeting with hospital officials, President Johnson declared: “The federal government is not going to retreat from its clear responsibility … and I hope that you will not retreat either.” By June 15, more than 80 percent of hospitals were complying, and by June 30, the number had risen to 94 percent. “By January 1967,” Smith reports, “the mopping up, with only a few exceptions, had been completed.”
Not all changes were welcome. According to Smith, “within two decades of the implementation of Medicare, all but four of the more than 400 20th century historically black hospitals had closed or converted to other purposes.” The Office of Equal Health Opportunity was disbanded by President Richard Nixon. And the problems of racial and ethnic inequities and disparities in health and health care are enduring national concerns.
Still, the rapid and effective desegregation of U.S. hospitals is one of our nation’s—and our health care system’s—shining moments. Smith’s book is the authoritative source to understand the political, social, economic, and cultural context of this transformation. Perhaps as monuments to Confederate generals are demolished, we might find space for a monument to Dr. Jean Cowsert.
Editor’s Note: This review as originally published incorrectly stated Dr. Jean Cowsert’s race. Cowsert was a white woman and physician allied with the civil rights movement.
