But he knows how to make his case. During his Tuesday night lecture at Franklin & Marshall College, Satcher discussed the problems he has with the country's health care system. And he didn't try to soften the blow, delivering a few sound bites that just plain stung:
"Health care is a commodity to be traded to the highest bidder. The result is a system that allows 44 million people around the country to go uninsured," he said of drug company ethics.
Or this: "Will we have an AIDS vaccine in the near future? Not likely. If there's not a lot of money to be made, it's hard to get drug companies excited about investing in it."
And then he starts with the statistics:
1.7 million children around the world die annually from diseases that are preventable by vaccination.
120 million women who want and need access to family planning can't get it.
It costs $800 million to bring a drug to market in the United States.
But Satcher's argument isn't the indictment it could be. He still calls himself an "optimist" when it comes to the future of health care in the country and the world. He even goes so far as to say it's not too late for a national health care system to be developed that is worthy of a country that annually spends a lopsided 90 percent of its health care budget to treat diseases and only 2 percent to prevent them.
"There's so much concern about the health care system and so much frustration, especially with health care providers," Satcher said. "We're the only industrialized country in the world without universal health care. We spend more per capita on health care than other countries, but the system still left out too many people. But I'm an optimist. We can no longer find acceptable a system that leaves so many out."
Ironically, this man who helped shape health care policy for the most powerful nation in the world was left out. When he was just 2, Satcher suffered a potentially lethal bout of whooping cough and pneumonia. As a black child growing up on a rural Alabama farm in the 1940s, the odds of survival were stacked against him. Two of his nine siblings had died very young, and his family had no access to hospital care.
It was a black country physician named Dr. Jackson who saved Satcher's life by coming to the family farm on his day off and caring for him. The experience was so meaningful to Satcher that there are few articles written about him that don't cite it as the inspiration that made him devote his career to narrowing the health care access gap among underserved populations.
Still, Satcher believes it's that access gap that keeps the truck broken nearly 60 years later.
Ask him about the morality of abortion, and it doesn't matter. Ask him about the politics that help line the pockets of drug companies, and it still doesn't matter. Satcher said the health care system will remain crippled as long as people are uninsured and underinsured.
"The first thing we need to do is make sure everyone here has access," Satcher said. "Until we do that, the political issues are moot."
Satcher came with his own ideas about what will finally push the United States into the league of other industrialized nations providing national health care to their citizens. He said, thanks to this country's collective frustration with the system, the tide is likely to turn. Those currently underserved by the system will see more access as that frustration grows. And that's a good thing for all of us.
"We don't have to take anything from anybody to reach this goal of universal care, but we do have to improve access," Satcher said. "The people who benefit most when we have advances are often the people who need it most."