The real reason it's so expensive to go to the hospital
Banned Histories of Race in America
The civil rights movement of the late 1800s forced states to pass laws banning racial discrimination. Big companies throughout the country often responded in tears, “But racial discrimination makes us so much moneeeeeyyyyyyy!”
One of these companies was Prudential Insurance. They were raking it in by over-charging Black people for insurance policies. Since business literally wasn’t worth doing without being racist about it, civil rights were the target. On top of that, this fraudulent industry had another fight on its hands because in 1883, Germany had created the first-of-its-kind national healthcare system.
Everyone living in a society with a physical body was really into the idea, so what was poor Prudential to do?
Their answer was to hire a German immigrant named Frederick Ludwig Hoffman. Now, the thing you have to remember about Frederick is that he was—to use the academic parlance of the era—an absolute fucking imbecile. After exclusively failing out of one school after another, then being fired by one job after another, Frederick left Germany for the US. Soon he would be commissioned by Prudential to publish a series of articles. Now, if you’re wondering how that could possibly happen, you should know what Frederick lacked in intelligence, he more than made up for in boisterous, fanatical racism.
In 1896, Frederick began publishing what would eventually become a 330-page tome called Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro and in the preface Frederick immediately puts you at ease, “Being of foreign birth, a German, I was fortunately free from a personal bias which might have made an impartial treatment on this subject difficult.”
Now, if you’re thinking that being “a German” at that particular moment in history isn’t exactly a convincing case for immunity to racial bias, Frederick clears things up by continuously declaring the superiority of the Aryan race. For example, on page 327 he expounds, “Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy.”
At 5’7” 110 lbs., having been rejected from military service for physical deficiency, Frederick, the archetype of Aryan superiority was the exact cliché you feared.
Race Traits goes on about white people being physically stronger than Black people and how the weight of a human brain can be predicted by the degree of a person’s Blackness. It explains, “Deaths from inanition, debility and atrophy are largely the result of inferior organisms and constitutional weakness,” which Hoffman declared to be, “one of the most pronounced race characteristics of the American negro.”
Maybe at this point you’re wondering what possible use this proto-nazi dipshit drivel might be to Prudential Insurance. Well, a lot. Hoffman continues, “So long as immorality and vice are a habit of life of the vast majority of the colored population, the effect will be to increase the mortality by hereditary transmission of weak constitutions, and to lower still further the rate of natural increase, until the births fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction results.”
Even though it was lambasted by most thinking people who read it, Race Traits was all Prudential needed. If a case could be made that Black people were so biologically and morally inferior as to eventually, collectively kill ourselves off, it could only be an ethical business practice to charge us more for insurance, right?
Race Traits became invaluable to corporations and politicians looking to profit from racism and it was especially useful to the insurance industry. From 1915 to 1920, as calls for national healthcare were again increasing, Hoffman successfully campaigned against it. He was a vice president of Prudential by then, so, good for him.
In 1945, when President Truman proposed national health insurance, southern politicians blocked it to keep Black people out. Anyone who wanted to argue about it could take it up with the always-reasonable insurance industry. This was the pattern through the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965 as well as the Affordable Care Act.
So, the next time you see that meme about how “Universal health care is such a complex beast that only 32 of the world's 33 developed nations have been able to make it work” you can now stop wondering why.