Michigan’s Licensing Department Grills Drug Providers on Race, DEI Policies

Why does a state regulatory agency care about a physician’s opinions on the role of “implicit bias” in health outcomes?

Well, according to Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA), physicians’ opinions on this topic must be of some importance.

LARA sent out surveys to physicians, giving them gift cards in exchange for rating their level of agreement with a series of statements ostensibly related to LARA’s rule changes governing the prescribing of buprenorphine.

Buprenorphine is a medication that works as a partial-opioid agonist and is used to treat individuals suffering from addiction to opioids such as fentanyl, heroin, or oxycontin.

The statements in the survey appeared to portray racial minorities as having worse drug treatment outcomes due to systemic factors or implicit bias.

For instance, the survey included statements such as: “Black and Hispanic/Latino patients are less likely than patients of other racial groups to have successful treatment outcomes due to implicit bias”; “Black patients are at a higher risk for opioid overdose compared to patients of other racial groups”; “White patients receive medication for opioid use disorder more frequently than Black and Hispanic/Latino patients”; and “Communities that service a higher volume of Black Patients have more access to methadone programs which are subject to stricter regulatory requirements than white communities.”

Additionally, LARA asked physicians to provide information on whether their healthcare facility provides “training” to address the “diverse needs” of patients.

“My facility offers training to better address the diverse needs of patients from various cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, as well as the LGBTQIA+ community,” the survey asked.

Why this information is at all relevant to LARA is unclear, but it’s disturbing nonetheless that a regulatory agency is intent on grilling physicians regarding their adherence to DEI ideology.

Yet this is par for the course for LARA and the Michigan executive branch. In 2022, pursuant to a 2020 executive order issued by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, LARA mandated physicians to take a continuing education course on “implicit bias.”

The implicit bias training program must include strategies to reduce disparities in access to and delivery of healthcare services, and discuss, among other topics, current research on implicit bias in the access to and delivery of healthcare services.

As a result, Do No Harm set up our implicit bias course, meeting LARA’s requirements, while dispelling myths of systemic racism by providing factual, evidence-based information on the topic.

There is no solid evidence finding a causal link between unconscious bias/implicit bias (which is itself a dubious concept at best) and racial disparities in health outcomes, with the tests used to evaluate or identify implicit bias found to be “poor predictors” of real-world bias and discrimination. 

Each year, opioids claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, with over 80,000 Americans dying from opioids in 2022 alone. LARA should not attempt to play ideological games with people’s lives and taxpayer dollars. Instead, it should ensure that physicians provide the best treatment possible for everyone.