Last month, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Center for Health Justice published a poll ostensibly showing Americans’ support for “health equity” – a somewhat nebulous concept often used to refer to efforts that seek to equalize health outcomes between racial groups through discrimination.
The AAMC poll asks respondents whether they are in favor of “everyone having a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health.”
Who could be against such a harmless platitude? But support for this goal, the AAMC implies, is actually support for “health equity.”
Indeed, in the article announcing the poll, Center for Health Justice Founding Director Philip M. Alberti attempts to redefine what health equity has long meant:
“[Health equity] does not mean equal health outcomes. It does not mean handing out unfair advantage. It does not mean taking health away from one community to give it to another — there is enough health to go around.”
If only the AAMC actually believed this.
As Do No Harm has documented, the AAMC itself has used the language of “health equity” to refer to initiatives that seek to equalize outcomes between racial groups, often through racial discrimination.
At the AAMC’s 2024 annual meeting, the organization hosted a session called “Strategies for Continuing the Commitment to DEI Values and Achieving Health Equity” in which speakers discussed methods for continuing racially conscious admissions practices.
The AAMC’s amicus brief in support of racially discriminatory admissions policies refers to health equity in the context of equalized health outcomes: “Thousands of other studies have documented race-linked health inequities pervading nearly every index of human health, which combine to result in an overall reduced life expectancy for racial and ethnic minorities that cannot be explained by genetics.”
Alberti even co-authored a research brief published not two years ago titled “Racial Justice and Health Equity: Public Perspectives on Reparations in America,” advocating for racial reparations (which are of course inherently discriminatory) to address health inequities!
It’s hard to see how transferring wealth from one racial group to another, or prioritizing certain racial groups over others in admissions, isn’t “handing out unfair advantage.”
The AAMC is shamelessly attempting to conflate a shorthand for racial discrimination with an anodyne commitment to “opportunity.”
If it were true that the AAMC had suddenly ditched its discriminatory ways, then we would applaud.
But, given the past few years of strident advocacy for racial discrimination, we’re just not buying it.
