Whereas since the Nation’s founding, the United States has had a longstanding history and legacy of racism, mistreatment, and discrimination against African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other people of color; Whereas the United States ratified over 350 treaties with sovereign indigenous communities, has broken the promises made in such treaties, and has historically failed to carry out its trust responsibilities to Native Americans, including American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, as made evident by the chronic and pervasive underfunding of the Indian Health Service and Tribal, Urban Indian, and Native Hawaiian health care, the vast health and socioeconomic disparities faced by Native American people, and the inaccessibility of many Federal public health and social programs in Native American communities; Whereas people of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, who became Americans through conquest, were subject to, but never full members of the polity of the United States and experienced widespread discrimination in employment, housing, education, and health care; Whereas the immoral paradox of slavery and freedom is an indelible wrong traced throughout the Nation’s history, as African Americans lived under the oppressive institution of slavery from 1619 through 1865, endured the practices and laws of segregation during the Jim Crow era, and continue to face the ramifications of systemic racism through unjust and discriminatory structures and policies; Whereas before the enactment of the Medicare Program, the United States health care system was highly segregated, and, as late as the mid-1960s, hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices throughout Northern and Southern States complied with Jim Crow laws and were completely segregated by race—leaving Black communities with little to no access to health care services