Commentary
Watch Dr. Goldfarb’s Testimony to the Missouri Legislature
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On March 6, Do No Harm chair Dr. Stanley Goldfarb testified before the Missouri House Committee on Government Accountability, chaired by Rep. Doug Richey, about an important bill moving through the Missouri legislature. HB 489, sponsored by Rep. Ben Baker, would begin to root out woke mandates in Missouri’s public medical schools and medical providers – a critical step in the fight to provide world-class care to every individual, regardless of race.
Watch Dr. Goldfarb’s brief testimony here:
Dr. Goldfarb discussed the danger of elevating diversity to an unhealthy degree. He stated: “Diversity should not require that we subjugate quality and merit for the sake of simply having individuals of different skin colors.”
He further criticized woke claims that health care suffers from systemic racism, which activists blame for causing health disparities. Dr. Goldfarb states: “Disparities are real. They are a major problem in American medicine. But they’re not due to the way various ethnic and racial groups are treated in the health care system.”
Finally, Dr. Goldfarb argued against a medical focus on non-medical issues, as woke activists demand:
“One of my great problems with spending large amounts of the medical curriculum on some of these issues of social conditions is that I as a physician can do nothing about equality of housing. I can do nothing about violence that occurs in communities. I can do nothing about food deserts.
I think these are important issues. They’re issues for you all – issues that the government and politicians and advocacy groups can work on. But my job as a physician, and the job we need to teach medical students, is to treat each patient, not as a member of a group, not as a black patient, but as an individual; not as a Jewish patient, but as an individual; not as a white patient, but as an individual who is unique and has unique medical problems.”
Missouri lawmakers are showing real leadership by debating these issues. Hopefully Dr. Goldfarb’s testimony will help pave the way for the bill’s passage – and the restoration of medical education and care grounded in equality and excellence.