Here is my second installment on the history of hospital care since the Hill-Burton Act. The forgotten narrative intertwined with Hill-Burton was the pervasive practice of racial segregation in hospitals.
The Hill-Burton Act of 1946 initiated a groundbreaking hospital and public health construction program to address the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. This Act, a federal-state initiative, allocated substantial federal grants to states for hospital construction. In debates, differing views emerged on discrimination, ultimately leading to the Act containing a separate-but-equal provision, allowing racial discrimination in healthcare provision. This provision was a unique feature in 20th-century federal legislation, explicitly permitting racially exclusionary services using federal funds.
The Hill-Burton program played a pivotal role in rebuilding the nation's hospital system, with the South benefiting significantly from the federal funding.
A landmark case, Simkins v. Moses H Cone Memorial Hospital (1963) brought to light the impact of segregation and racism:
"Jack Greenberg, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, received a telephone call from Dr George Simkins, whom he knew from Simkins’s past efforts to integrate Greensboro’s Gillespie Park Golf Course. Simkins, a dentist and president of the Greensboro, North Carolina, NAACP chapter, had seen a patient with an abscessed third molar, swollen jaw, and fever and determined that the young man needed to be hospitalized. He had called L. Richardson Memorial Hospital, Greensboro’s 91-bed black hospital, and been advised of a 2- or 3-week waiting list to get a bed. Simkins then called both the Wesley Long Community Hospital, a 78-bed hospital that had never admitted a black patient nor accepted a black physician for staff privileges, and the Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital, a 300-bed hospital that admitted black patients for special procedures but refused staff privileges to black physicians and dentists. Although Wesley Long and Moses H. Cone had rooms, neither would admit Simkins’s patient. That prompted Simkins to call Greenberg. Simkins later recalled, “I said, ‘We got to really do something about these hospitals down here. It’s a disgrace, a person could be dying.’”
These events were not that long ago. We still have more work to do.
#HealthcareHistory #HillBurtonAct #RacialSegregation #USHealthcareSystem
Read more: https://lnkd.in/ef35tCTi
