I’ve been reading a book by Thom Hartmann “The Hidden History of American Healthcare” where he describes the source of “the 20% that Medicare doesn’t pay”.
{{ The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.)
The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.
Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would “solve the race problem in America.”
Southern politicians quoted Hoffman at length, he was invited to speak before Congress, and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” Race Traits was one of the most influential books of its era.
When Medicare was enacted in the 1960’s, Southern politicians led by senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi insisted on a 20% co-pay on Medicare to make it harder for poor black people to access the program. Unfortunately a lot of poor whites were also caught in the net.
Hartmann details this history in the first 4 minutes of this video.
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