Power to Heal (working title)

The rapid desegregation of American hospitals in preparation for the rollout of Medicare was characterized by commitment at the top and passion all around. President Johnson who made passage of both Medicare and the Civil Rights Act priorities was personally committed to insuring that hospitals receiving Medicare funds did not discriminate. His Department of Health Education and Welfare recruited an army of volunteers from across the federal bureaucracy, who, together with national and grassroots civil rights activists, inspected thousands of hospitals across the US-- especially in the South--to insure that they complied with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In 1966, just 3 months before Medicare was implemented, less than half of hospitals were in compliance.  Building on the momentum and pressured by the Civil Rights Movement, the federal government organized a massive hospital inspection effort to ensure that no hospital practicing racial discrimination would receive essential Medicare funding. These federal inspectors drove down dirt roads, and with the help of civil rights activists, sought out patients, hospital janitors and health care workers in the Black community to collect information. They met with hospital administrators, some polite and cooperative and some belligerent and resistant. They were followed by police; their hotel phones tapped, but they were successful. In a mere 4 months thousands of hospitals were desegregated. While the process appeared quiet and uneventful from afar, it was fraught with intrigue, personal acts of courage, remarkable on-the-ground data gathering, and a fierce bureaucratic commitment to achieving equity not matched in the federal government before or since. Through the personal stories of people who experienced both segregation and integration and those who inspected hospitals and worked in them, this documentary examines how segregation was dismantled in hospitals in the south and north, and how astonishingly successful the effort was.