"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King recognized that institutional racism is endemic in the national health care system of the United States and that it is the most egregious form of racial discrimination in the land. This shocking and inhumane reality has intensified since our beloved advocate for social justice was murdered for merely speaking truth to power effectively thirty-eight years ago.

But we as a people will and must not be silenced, particularly in the midst of the dual genocidal pandemics of HIV/AIDS and drug addiction. Remember, health care is a birthright and government has a moral and legal duty to protect all of its residents.

The Honorable John Conyers (D. Mich.) who fought relentlessly to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, has picked up the vital anti-discrimination work of the unfinished business of the civil rights movement in the area of health care. He has done this by introducing the United States National Health Insurance Act (or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act). It is numbered HR 676 and it is the only health care reform legislation in the country that rests on the solemn principal that health care is a fundamental human right.

Representative Conyers often states that HR 676 is the most important piece of legislation he has offered in his over four decades of service in the United States Congress. Indeed, the passage HR 676 is a moral and fiscal imperative for all residents of the United States. We need an informed and no-nonsense human rights movement in the United States on this and related issues.

Understand, all people residing in the United States, the materially wealthiest nation in the history of humanity, spend more than anyone in the world for health care and have less to show for it. The US ranks 37th in the world in health care, based on indices for health outcomes.

Scholars have shown that the United States has a second rate health care system by comparison to other industrialized nations. The United States health care system doesn’t adequately cover half or more of its population. All other industrialized nations of the world cover everyone from cradle to grave. These nations all have better health care outcomes and have eliminated virtually all health care insecurity for the residents and visitors to their nations. Why is there a difference in the United States?

It is no surprise that the second rate US system permits and actually encourages an obscenely wealthy health insurance industry to profit by ensuring that people remain sick, dependent, and desperate. These people are disproportionately poor and are of color. HR 676 would remove the power of the private health insurance industry, as has been done in other industrialized nations, from the health care business. Good riddance! We have recently learned that the Aetna insurance company made its original bank roll by writing health insurance polices on African people who were held as chattel slaves in the United States. Aetna must be boycotted until it pays reparations.

The persistence of profiteering of the health insurance industry through their denial of the basic human right to health care, that includes the fact that our present system charges poor people more for medical services than the rich, is akin to modern day barbarism. Why? It is barbarism because the United States has the means to change this system now but refuses to do so despite the profound injuries that the present system causes human beings.

The incontrovertible fact is that the implementation of the Conyers Bill would immediately and substantially begin to decrease health care costs for virtually all US residents and the federal government, while at the same time, giving all residents, regardless of their employment status, age, income or citizenship status, immediate and comprehensive access to world class health care. People could also choose the private doctors of their choice which the current system prohibits for many people. Consequently, maintaining this current health care system with its demonstrable health risks and injuries to people is a criminal act.

Nearly 20,000 citizens of the United States die every year for no reason other than the fact that they have no health insurance. These people are disproportionately poor or are people of color. This adds up to about 120,000 needless deaths during the Bush administration alone. Also, thousands of “insured” middle class people are driven into bankruptcy because of a chronic health condition due to the private health insurance industries’ normal unaffordable co-pays, premiums, deductibles and denials of coverage.

However, HR 676 would insure everyone from cradle to grave: no premiums, co-pays, or deductibles; prescription drugs are covered at minimal costs. In the meantime, the number of avoidable deaths and bankruptcies are growing annually, commensurate to the annual increases of the ranks of the uninsured, underinsured, and the annual inexorable skyrocketing costs of basic health care insurance coverage and health care imposed by the private insurance companies.

These barbarous outcomes are institutionalized and deliberate.

Remember, despite the notable benefits that the traditional federal Medicare and Medicaid programs have provided since they were created in 1965, by the blood, tears, and sacrifices of the civil rights movement, they were themselves substantially watered down in 1965 by congressional political capitulation to the overtly racist Dixiecrats of that era. This was done, of course, to the immense frustration of the civil rights movement: no one should ever have to become destitute to get health care or live with the fluctuating and irrational State standards for Medicare eligibility, the enormous difficulty in finding health care providers, or the limitations on dental coverage. No senior should ever be denied long term health care for chronic conditions and specialty health care when that care is medically indicated.

John Conyers’ HR 676 would fix all of these and other deficiencies of the current federal Medicare (Medicaid would no longer be needed) programs while making significant added improvements.

Since 1965, the continued systemic right wing reaction by the federal government in the area of national health care policy is evidenced in its ever increasing, unfunded mandates for the States to pick up more Medicaid responsibilities, when the federal government knows fully that States are already overburdened with higher health care costs that will cause them to reduce other vital services to the most marginalized communities, the poor and people of color.

These outcomes are not conspiracies; they are simply all created by design for profit-seeking through collusive relationships of the federal government with private health insurance and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the fundamental human needs of people living in the United States.

Today, more parts of Medicare are becoming privatized, creating even more severe restrictions on affordability, access and quality of health care. It is simply a norm that seniors have no drug prescription benefit and the federal government permits the pharmaceutical industry to charge seniors whatever it wants for prescription drugs - and has the temerity to prohibit Medicare from negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry for the best price.

What is less well understood today by most ordinary folks, concerning the evolution of national domestic health care policy in the United States, is that this current reality is one manifestation of the triumph of white nationalism over Black interests, which were most demonstrable and powerfully expressed during the civil rights era.

The historic Back Lash of racism/white supremacy has fully whipped all residents of this country, but it has especially whipped its primary target the hardest. Accordingly, the extreme health deficit that is now experienced by the African descendant community within the United States was created during chattel slavery and systemically sustained to the present-day by de jure and de facto racial discrimination. Many of its ugly features are revealed by the current orchestrated deterioration of the health care system in the United States and its foreseeable deleterious and disproportionate impact upon African descendants residing in the United States in all areas of health outcomes.

Compared to whites, Blacks born now, on average, are expected to live 5 or more years less than whites; Black will suffer 40.5% more from deaths than whites; Blacks are 50% more likely to have high blood pressure than whites; and Blacks are 140% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. Regardless of the form of cancer, Blacks are less likely to be alive five years after diagnosis. This is even true of skin cancer. With respect to HIV/AIDS, in 2004, 50% of known cases in the US are African Americans, despite the fact that African Americans are only 12.3% of the population. In 2004, Black men were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS at a rate 603.7 % higher than for white men. Black women were diagnosed at a rate 1,993% higher than white women. Finally, the infant mortality racial disparity between Blacks and whites continues to grow, where Black are more likely to die in infancy than whites: 5.7 white baby deaths per 1,000 births as compared with 14 Black baby deaths per 1000 births.

Says Dr. Sloan, author of The Corporate Takeover of Healthcare in America: Practicing Medicine Without a License, speaking about the incredible health care disparities inflicted on people of color, “the mystery is why anyone thinks the reasons are mysterious…Show me an authority that says the reasons are unknown or ‘mysterious’ and I will show you either a racist or a fool.”

This perennial racial health disparity dynamic has been compounded by the flooding of drugs into the Black and brown communities; it began in the 1970’s as the foreseeable consequence of United States federal government’s foreign policy deliberate activities to stop democratic and human rights movements in the global south.

Hence, a drug pandemic and a concomitant violence pandemic were created in the Black and brown communities by the federal government. The federal government then countered by cynically implementing phony criminal punishment policies that criminalized illnesses and victims rather than providing appropriate remedial relief for a public health catastrophe that the federal government itself created. Its payoff was the profound disempowerment politically and economically of two generations of African Americans whose parents and grandparents had led the way to freedom in the 1960’s and whose progeny now, are vastly and disproportionately warehoused by the US Gulag prison industry, where there is no meaningful programming, abysmal health care, and where drugs and contagious illnesses are rampant.

This entire social cauldron of federal government constructed anomie, pathology, and racism has been taking place in the midst of the still worst public health crisis in world history, the HIV/AIDS pandemic where, as World AIDS day just passes, African descendants and other marginalized populations in the United States in 2006 are dying while waiting on long waiting-lists for life saving anti-retroviral medications because they simply have no health insurance. The federal government’s response is to keep AIDS funding flat each year despite the yearly increases in AIDS cases and deepening burden on an already failed health care system. This comprehensive picture of reality shocks the conscience and must end now. It is nothing less than a crime against humanity.

HR 676 would immediately begin to eliminate, substantially, the racial disparity health gap; health care insecurity would cease; and the overall quality of care and health outcomes would improve on average for all residents in the United States. We need HR 676 now. We can afford it now and we cannot afford not to achieve it.

African people gave us the great multi-genius, Imhotep, the true first father of medicine. The brilliant physician and scholar, Prof. Frederick Newsome, MD of Harlem Hospital and Columbia University Medical College, in his new book, An African American Philosophy of Medicine (2005) reminds us that the historian Herodotus observed in 450 BC that the ancient Egyptians “have discovered more prognostics than all the rest of mankind…”

So you see, African people are not new kids on the block in the creation of health care systems and the promotion of health care for all on the world stage. Martin Luther King Jr., Congressman John Conyers, and far too many others to name have laid and our laying the foundation to make manifest health care now as a birthright despite the odds.

We must now build the grassroots movement with all of our political allies from all walks of life that finishes the unfinished business of the civil right movement and wins forever health care for all as a fundamental human right.

We must deconstruct white supremacy in all of its subtlety, expose the disinformation of the insurance industry and their political hacks; we must educate all communities that health reform that permits the private health insurance industries to remain in the health care business is sham reform and a deliberate deception; and finally, we must tell the plain truth to all, that profiteering from the illnesses of others is making more and more people and this nation sicker and sicker and that we must and can end this failed system and replace it with a humane and successful one by any means necessary. The time is now and we must seize that time now.

Call Healthcare-Now at 1-800-453-1305 for more information. We will assist you in organizing your community for passage of HR 676. Together we have the power to prevail. Contact us today by email. Please go to www.Healthcare-Now.org for a full description and analysis of HR 676 and suggestions on how you can help us to make HR 676 the law of the land.

Mr. Sankofa is a human rights public policy specialist and community organizer. He is a national organizer for Healthcare-Now. He is also the strategic planning consultant for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, Legal Defense, Research, and Education Fund. As a former trial attorney, specializing in complex institutional reform litigation, Mr. Sankofa, directed the AIDS Project of the National Prison Project of the ACLU Foundation. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine and the Antioch School of Law. Raised in Washington, DC, Mr. Sankofa now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Click here to contact Ajamu K. Sankofa, Esq. and Healthcare-NOW.

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