When Family Physicians Forget Their Principles

Kansas City, watch out. The American Academy of Family Physicians is preparing to hold its 49^th National Conference of Medical Students there. Before that happens, one of its executives has a message: Discrimination and division are good for medicine.

That’s the takeaway from a letter in the Kansas City Star by Karen Mitchell, the Academy’s Vice President of Medical Education. She laments the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of affirmative action, while calling on medical schools and policymakers to find new ways to discriminate by race and indoctrinate students and physicians.

Ms. Mitchell should ask patients what kind of physician they want to see. The answer will always be the best physician possible, not someone who was hired because of their skin color or someone who was trained to be a political activist. When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, which medical schools have used for decades, it opened the door to recruiting students based on merit. Equal treatment under the law is essential to the quality of the future physician workforce.

The Academy should be supporting, not opposing, merit in medical education. It should also be supporting legislation that gets divisive and discriminatory ideology out of medical schools. Bills to that effect nearly passed in both Kansas and Missouri this spring. They deserve to be brought back up and signed into law as soon as possible.

For that matter, as Kansas City prepares to host the National Conference of Medical Students, residents should ask the American Academy of Family Physicians to explain why it’s so focused on race. You’d think it would be more concerned with ensuring that every patient gets the best physician and best possible care. That’s what patients in Kansas City and everywhere else deserve, even if it’s not what medical elites want.