Healthcare Needs Real Solutions, Not Reparations

Most people want healthcare to help them lead better, happier, healthier lives. However, most people aren’t professors at Harvard Medical School, two of whom are demanding that healthcare focus less on helping individual patients and more on supporting federal reparations for slavery.

That’s the takeaway from a recent piece in the Boston Review, entitled “An Anti-Racist Agenda For Medicine,” which broadly captures the worldview of the radical activists targeting healthcare. The two Harvard professors admit to relying on Critical Race Theory, which helped them recognize the “institutional racism” that apparently surrounds them. Unsurprisingly, this divisive theory leads the Harvard professors to call for divisive actions.

To start, they want “race-explicit interventions,” which is code for discriminating against patients when providing treatments or care.  They outright reject the idea of being “colorblind,” which they call ineffective. Never mind that their own ideology comes with a hefty dose of blindness. It demands that physicians put people in racial groups, which blocks them from seeing – and serving – patients’ unique needs.

Finally, the professors call for reparations, which they rebrand as “medical restitution.” They make a tortured argument that reparations are fundamentally a matter of healthcare, but that’s not medical science talking. It’s politics, and politics has no place in medicine.

There’s no doubt that barriers keep people from accessing medical care. But the solution is to break those barriers, not create new ones by discriminating on the basis of race and putting healthcare in the middle of divisive political debates. Patients needs real solutions, not reparations.