Many forces have prevented the United States from achieving universal healthcare, including a failure to properly regulate the trillion-dollar healthcare industry and a near-total unwillingness to grapple with the ethics of for-profit medicine. But the role of racism and the legacy of slavery cannot be denied. The same arguments—about dependency and socialized medicine, equity and human rights—that thwarted the Freedmen’s Bureau Medical Division in Crumpler’s time and blocked universal healthcare during Cobb’s time have echoed down to the present day.
