Racism Is A Big Factor In Why The U.S. Doesn't Have A Better (And Cheaper) Healthcare System

The following is part of an excellent and thought-provoking post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report: 

America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us. 

We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare systems in the developed world, with Thailand and Ecuador even beating us out. 

And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people. 

If that sounds irrational, it is. But it’s also completely consistent with a history that includes white communities closing their own schools and swimming pools back in the 1960s when LBJ forced them to allow Black children in.

Sixty-six years ago, on a campaign swing through Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson turned to his press secretary Bill Moyers in a hotel room and explained, with the bluntness of a man who’d grown up watching it work in Texas, why America couldn’t have nice things. 

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” LBJ said, “he won’t notice your picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” 

Moyers wrote about it years later in The Washington Post, and the line has been quoted ever since because it explained, in one sentence, the entire arc of “conservative” behavior from Reconstruction to Nixon to Reagan to Trump.

Last week, a pair of political scientists at the University of Delaware put empirical meat on the bones of what Johnson learned the hard way. Sumeyye Mine Iltekin Gocer and Joanne M. Miller, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Research and Politics, surveyed more than 700 white Americans and split them into two groups.

One group was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing politically. The other was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing compared to racial minorities. Both were then asked how they felt about economic redistribution programs like food stamps and Medicaid, the things that put food on tables and keep people from dying of treatable diseases.

The first group’s answers tracked roughly with their income and ideology. The second group, the ones prompted to think about race before answering, turned against redistribution across the board, even programs that would obviously benefit them, even when they themselves were poor.

 

The mere act of comparing themselves to Black and brown Americans made them willing to sacrifice their own healthcare, their own paycheck, their own kid’s future, as long as people of color were sacrificed too.

That’s the trap. That’s how a country with the largest economy in human history ends up as the only developed nation on Earth without universal healthcare, the only rich country where 600,000 people a year still go bankrupt because somebody in the family got sick, and where, alone among our peer nations, we’ve built an entire group of healthcare billionaires on the simple business model of denying claims and pocketing the difference.

There are now fifty-one of them. Fifty-one Americans whose ten-figure fortunes exist because we refused, decade after decade, to do what every other developed country figured out by the 1970s.

Becker’s Hospital Review crunched the latest Forbes list and counted them up: hospital chain heirs like Thomas Frist Jr. at $41.1 billion, medical-device dynasties like the Cooks and the Strykers, pharma fortunes, insurance fortunes, and a long tail of executives who got fabulously wealthy off the misery of people trying to pay for chemo. 

Some who became morbidly rich off healthcare even went into politics like Senator Rick Scott, whose company committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history when he was CEO. Others simply pour millions into buying Republican politicians and judges to maintain the profitable status quo.

These billionaires exist nowhere else in the developed world for a simple reason: no other developed country has set up its healthcare system so that human sickness is a profit center.

From Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to Bush’s Willie Horton ads to Trump’s racist birtherism, scaring White people about Black people has been the go-to position of the GOP since the 1960s. And stopping “socialism” that may benefit Black or Hispanic people is at its core. 

Canada doesn’t have hospital billionaires. France doesn’t have insurance billionaires. We do, and we have fifty-one of them, and the reason we do is the reason LBJ named in that hotel room.

The people who’d benefit most from a national healthcare system are the people who keep voting against it. Look at the map. Of the ten states that still refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, seven are former Confederate states with large Black populations.

 

Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have together left billions of federal dollars sitting on the table, billions that would have built rural clinics, kept hospitals open, paid for prenatal care, and saved roughly 1.5 million of their own citizens from going uninsured. 

Their Republican legislators won’t take the money, their Republican governors campaign against the money, and their Republican voters keep electing the people who refuse the money, all because that money would also benefit the Black and Hispanic people who live in those states.

And the bodies pile up. Tennessee has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States, 42.1 deaths per 100,000 live births averaged across 2019 to 2023, with Louisiana and Mississippi right behind. 

The Commonwealth Fund found this past summer that Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee all have maternal death rates more than double those of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Mississippi just declared a public health emergency over infant mortality because the state’s babies are dying at the rate of 9.7 per 1,000 live births, nearly double the national average, and for Black babies in Mississippi the rate is 15.2, which would be a national emergency in any country that wasn’t busy looking the other way.

Life expectancy tells the same story in the same racist handwriting. Mississippi sits dead last in the country at around 71 years, followed by West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Kentucky. . . .

LBJ laid out the con in a Tennessee hotel room in 1960. The Delaware researchers just confirmed it in 2026. 

The only question left is whether we’ll act on what we now know, or whether somebody like me in the next generation will be writing the same article about the seventy-fifth healthcare billionaire and asking the same exhausted question about why we still can’t have what every other developed country built two generations ago.

Killing Kirk Was Wrong - But He Was NOT A Hero Or Martyr!

The American right-wing is now trying to portray Charlie Kirk as a martyr for this country. Donald Trump wants you to believe Kirk was a hero, and plans to give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Such nonsense! Kirk's killing was a heinous crime, and should be punished harshly. And Kirk, thanks to our freedom of speech, had the right to spread and defend his political views. But he was no hero or martyr, because his rabid right-wing views were both false and anti-democratic.

David Corn (in Mother Jones) tells the truth about Charlie Kirk:

Here’s the problem: Kirk built that movement with falsehoods. And his advocacy was laced with racist and bigoted statements. Recognizing this does not diminish the awfulness of this act of violence. Nor does it lessen our outrage or diminish our sympathy for his family, friends, and colleagues. Yet if this is an appropriate moment to assess Kirk and issue bold statements about his participation in America’s political life, there ought to be room for a true discussion.

Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded and led Turning Point USA, an organization of young conservatives, was a promoter of Trump’s destructive and baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Two days before the January 6 riot, Kirk boasted in a tweet that Students for Trump and Turning Point Action were “Sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” . . .

Even prior to the election, Kirk helped set the stage for Trump’s attempt to subvert the republic. In September 2020, the Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action was running a “sprawling yet secretive campaign” to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda “that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.” The messages Turning Point generated spread the charge that Democrats were using mail balloting to steal the election and downplayed the threat from Covid. . . .

Kirk’s advocacy of vigorous debate ought not be separated from what he said while jousting in the public square. He hosted white nationalists on his podcast. He posted racist comments on his X account, including this remark: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.'” He endorsed the white “replacement” conspiracy theory. After the October 7 attack on Israel, he compared Black Lives Matter to Hamas. He called for preserving “white demographics in America.” He asserted that Islam was not compatible with Western culture. He derided women who supported Kamala Harris 2024 for wanting “careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” Or, as he also put it, “Democratic women want to die alone without children.” When Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was brutally attacked in 2022, Kirk spread a conspiracy theory about the crime and called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the assailant. He routinely deployed extreme rhetoric to demonize his political foes. . . .

Moreover, as a movement strategist, he relied upon and advanced lies and bigotry—including falsehoods that fueled violence and an assault on our national foundation. That was not a side gig for Kirk. It was a core component of his organizing. He did not practice politics the right way. He used deceit to develop his movement and to weaken the United States. His assassination is heinous and frightening and warrants widespread condemnation. It should prompt reflection on what is happening within the nation and what needs to be done to prevent further political violence. It should not protect him or others who engage in such politics of extremism from critical review. 

Racism Is Back (And With Trump's Help, It Is Winning)

It's not something that decent Americans want to admit, but the United States has always been a racist country. It was even written into out original Constitution, where slavery was recognized and slaves were counted as only three-fifths of a person for census purposes.

President Abraham Lincoln and Congress tried to remedy it with the Fourteenth Amendment - guaranteeing citizenship to everyone born in the United States. But the effect was short-lived, and the South soon devoted with Jim Crow laws denying equal rights to Blacks.

President Johnson and Congress tried again to remedy it with a series of Civil Rights laws in the 1960's, and things did get somewhat better (although institutional racism continued). Public racism was subdued. The nation even, a few years later, elected its first Black president in Barack Obama.

With the election of Obama, some mistakenly believed racism had been defeated. They were wrong. Obama's election just made the subdued racists more bold, and they came back out from under their rocks. Fearing they were about to lose their white privilege made them angry and they became more public with their sick views.

Donald Trump didn't invent this new and bolder racism, but he recognized it because it coincided with his own views - and he used it to be elected. Now he is trying to re-establish white supremacy - and so far, he is succeeding.

Trump, and his MAGA Republican cohorts, are smart enough not to use the old ideas of racism. They are disguising it in new terms. The two prongs they are using are immigration and D.E.I., but make no mistake, it's the same old racism.

Note that the immigration deportations are not aimed at white immigrants (from Europe, Canada, and even South Africa). The deportations are limited to non-whites. And he's even going further - revoking the legal status of non-white immigrants and denying visas to those from predominately non-white countries. They are now even trying to revoke the citizenship of non-white naturalized citizens and denying citizenship to non-whites born in the United States.

The war on D.E.I. (diversity-equity-inclusion) is the same attack on non-whites. Instead of including them in the American experience, it seeks to exclude them from the opportunities open to white Americans.

The fact that Trump has been successful in his wars on immigration and D.E.I. show that racism is alive and well in the United States. Some progress has been made, but the U.S. is still a racist country. And sadly, the racists and white supremacists are back in control of our government.

Can this country redeem itself and get back on the path toward defeating and eliminating racism? I hope so. The elections of 2026 and 2028 will give us the answer.

Donald Trump's Rant On June 19th Was Ridiculous (And Racist)!

On June 19th, Trump continued his war against nonwhites in this country. Instead of noting the importance of the holiday marking the end of slavery in this country, Trump inferred that it should not even be a holiday. That was ridiculous - and racist!

Here is part of Helaine Olen's response on MSNBC:

On Thursday evening, the night of Juneteenth, Donald Trump took to Truth Social with a classic “old man yells at cloud” complaint: Americans get too much time off work. . . .

The president is wrong. We need more holidays, not fewer, and we need more time off in general.

That Trump is complaining at all is odd given that during the 2020 campaign, he promised to make Juneteenth a holiday. And he never seems to have a problem taking time off work to play golf at taxpayers’ expense. He has now decided — on a day that celebrates the end of slavery no less — that Americans need to work harder.

True, Trump did not mention Juneteenth in his online rant, but the timing could not be clearer. And it comes as his administration has cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, targeting universities and federal departments alike, and stopped official celebrations of holidays like Juneteenth and remembrances like Holocaust Remembrance Day and Women’s Equality Day.

We do not have too many federal holidays in the United States; we have, if anything, slightly fewer than many other OECD countries. And the U.S. is alone among its peer countries in not mandating even one paid day off work for workers. That includes not just vacation but federal holidays like Christmas, July 4 and Juneteenth. There’s evidence that Americans now take less vacation from work — not more — than they did as recently as 25 years ago.

We are, contrary to Trump’s assertion, the most overworked nation in the developed world. Surveys regularly show many of us do not take all our vacation time. Higher-paid workers say they fear falling behind on the job, while lower-paid ones say they fear getting the ax if they take too many personal days. . . .

Studies show that vacations — even just a long weekend or an occasional personal day — not only enhance mental and physicalhealth, they improve worker productivity and help combat burnout. Employers, even if they don’t always want to admit it, benefit from our paid time away from the job. We can’t live to work. We need time to recharge our batteries, to take a break and smell the roses.

In a world where many Americans won’t use all their vacation time, paid official holidays are even more important. But, again, employers are not required to give them. No private-sector employer was forced to close their doors for Juneteenth. . . .

To be clear, Juneteenth should be a holiday regardless of Americans’ workload. Slavery is the greatest moral shame of the United States, and we should commemorate its end. But not only does slavery’s end deserve celebration, there are many more reasons for Americans to have many more days off. It’s a shame Trump can’t see that.