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- 1965: The Year That Brought Civil Rights To The Nation’s Hospitals
Michelle Andrews, Kaiser Health News, August 9, 2016 In “The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System", David Barton Smith takes us back to the mid-1960s, when a small band of civil rights activists-cum-government bureaucrats toiled to get the nascent Medicare program up and running. In the process, they profoundly changed the way health care is delivered in this country.
- David Barton Smith biographical entries
- David Barton Smith on ‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast
Nicolas Terry and Frank Pasquale (David Barton Smith begins at 10:30 of the podcast), Sept 6, 2016 This week we welcome David Barton Smith, Emeritus Professor at Temple University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. David is a prolific author. He won the 1995 Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Investigator Award for research on the history and legacy of the racial segregation of health care and continues to lecture widely on this topic.We discussed his most recent book, The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health System (Vanderbilt Press, 2016), which has already received the Goldberg Prize for the best book in the area of medicine this year. (More information at http://blogs.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2016/09/06/david-barton-smith-on-the-week-in-health-law-podcast/)
- Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation
David Barton Smith offers a complete chronicle of racial segregation and discrimination in health care in the United States using vivid first-hand accounts as well as current evidence of inequity in patterns of use and outcomes. Smith details judicial and federal efforts to address these disparities, discusses their persistence in more subtle forms, and offers possible strategies for ending them. Health Care Divided tells the story from 1920 to the present by distilling a narrative from archival records and interviews with key participants. The book traces the decisive role race has played in shaping our system of medical care and explores the effect of this legacy on long-term care for the elderly and prenatal care for infants.
- Panel for Screening of The Power to Heal
Audio recording of a panel discussion of a premiere screening of the documentary The Power to Heal in April 2018 at the Duke Trent Semans Center
- Power to Heal (60 min) - PBS documentary
POWER TO HEAL is an hour-long public television documentary that tells a poignant chapter in the historic struggle to secure equal and adequate access to healthcare for all Americans. Central to the story is the tale of how a new national program, Medicare, was used to mount a dramatic, coordinated effort that desegregated thousands of hospitals across the country in a matter of months. Before Medicare, disparities in access to hospital care were dramatic. Less than half the nation's hospitals served black and white patients equally, and in the South, 1/3 of hospitals would not admit African-Americans even for emergencies.
- The Power to Heal Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America's Health Care System
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.