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This month marks the one-year anniversary of a thoroughly woke – and truly disturbing – healthcare policy. In April 2021, Vermont put racial discrimination at the center of the state’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout. It’s worth remembering what happened, so we can work to ensure it never happen again.
In the early days of COVID-19 vaccines, the most vulnerable populations were put at the front of the line. The main focus was on the elderly, and Vermont was no exception: People age 50 and older were initially able to register for vaccines. Then radical ideology got involved.
Vermont Governor Phil Scott announced that individuals who are BIPOC – which stands for “Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color” – could register for the vaccine as young as 16 years old, while everyone else wasn’t eligible unless they were much older. It was a clear-cut case of doling out a critical treatment on the basis of skin color, not medical need. That’s exactly the kind of discrimination that “anti-racism” requires. It left fewer vaccines for the most vulnerable Vermonters.
The media lauded this backwards policy, saying things like “it’s not even that big of a deal,” while the Governor labeled opposition to the policy a “racist response.” Yet what’s actually racist is making skin color the determining factor in whether someone gets potentially life-saving treatment.
Activists are demanding exactly that, and not just with COVID vaccines. Americans of all races should oppose such discrimination for the sake of their own health.
The American Medical Association is at the forefront of the radical takeover of healthcare. Look no further than its “strategic plan to dismantle structural racism,” which is really an instruction manual for embedding racial discrimination into every part of medicine.
In announcing the plan, the AMA came out with plenty of platitudes about “achieving optimal health for all” and promoting “the betterment of public health.” These things are very important and urgently needed, but the plan’s details will undermine those critical goals. Why? Because its main focus is “implementing anti-racist equity strategies via practices, programming, policies, and culture.”
Those words are code for putting group health over individual medical needs and looking at every medical decision and interaction through the lens of race. Such is the nature of anti-racism, and as we’ve already seen, it leads to giving preferential treatment to people of specific races and harming the health of vulnerable patients.
Patients will suffer as the AMA’s demands seep into healthcare – and so will the physicians the AMA claims to represent. They’ll find it harder to help the individual patient in front of them, which isn’t why they devoted their lives to the practice of medicine. They swore an oath to “do no harm,” yet anti-racism is the road to harm.
Physicians will also be turned into political activists, since the AMA wants to equip them with the “tools for dismantling structural and social drivers of health inequities.” The name for that is politicking, and it has no place in the American Medical Association, much less healthcare as a whole.
Medical research matters to the health and well-being of every American. So it matters when leading healthcare academic journals put ideology, not new innovation or actionable information, at the heart of their work. Look no further than Health Affairs, one of the most respected publications in medicine, which has created a strategy to “dismantle racism” in medical research.
At the core of Health Affairs’ strategy is the obsession with the skin color of everyone involved in medical scholarship. Since the start of this year, it has required study authors and reviewers to answer “questions about their race, ethnicity, and gender.” The publication will soon issue statistical reports on the racial and gender makeup of those involved in its work. Yet such race-based reporting goes well beyond medical research, nor does it advance the scholarship on which medical progress depends.
What’s more concerning is what Health Affairs is doing once the data is in hand. It plans to select study reviewers and commission new papers based on people’s race, which runs counter to the purpose of the publication. The determining factor in such decisions should be expertise, not identity. Yet under the radical and divisive ideology of “anti-racism,” identity is more important than anything else.
Whether it’s Health Affairs or any other medical journal, the focus should be on empowering physicians to deliver better treatments and care to their patients. Choosing reviewers and study authors based on skin color will not advance a noble and necessary goal. And ultimately, giving in to activists’ demands will hold back the medical progress that Americans deserve.
Does your doctor or hospital use a so-called “race calculator” to determine who gets medical care? It’s a question every patient needs to ask. These blatantly discriminatory policies are the direct result of divisive anti-racist ideology and they’re rapidly spreading across healthcare.
A “race calculator” is exactly what it sounds like: A tool that takes a patient’s race into account when determining whether he or she gets medical treatment. If you are a patient of a certain race, you are more likely to receive the care you need, whereas if you’re a member of other races, you are less likely. Race calculators are steeped in identity politics and antithetical to providing personalized care to individual patients, which is what healthcare is supposed to do.
Race calculators are more and more common. Consider SSM Health, a hospital chain in four midwestern states. It used this discriminatory practice to determine which patients would receive COVID-19 therapeutics. Fortunately, it backed off after being called out by a local Wisconsin advocacy group.
State health departments are pushing the same kind of policies at a statewide level. Minnesota and Utah both rescinded their policies after justified public pressure, but states like New York are pushing ahead. The American Medical Association has thrown its weight behind New York’s race calculator, even though it’s incompatible with physicians’ oath to “do no harm.”
These policies are set to become more common, not less. One reason is that the federal government is bribing physicians to develop “anti-racism” plans, which could include implementing race calculators. Every patient should ask if their healthcare provider is engaged in such blatant discrimination, and if so, demand an end to it and the return of fairness and equal healthcare access for all.
Washington state just provided the latest proof that anti-racism in healthcare leads to discrimination. The King County Department of Human Resources recently held a health workshop purporting to show that dieting is racist, and when a white employee attempted to join, he was promptly kicked out.
The employee was initially told he was removed because of a “technical issue,” but the county eventually admitted his skin color was the determining factor. Tellingly, he wasn’t kicked out until he turned on his video camera, meaning he was only banned once his identity was visible. It turns out the workshop was also advertised as being open only to members of specific races – a clear act of discrimination.
What’s more, the workshop itself was full of divisive anti-racist ideology. Entitled “Anti-Blackness and Diet Culture,” it focused on how “Western ideals” of health “are steeped in whiteness” and therefore illegitimate. Similar language is cropping up across the entire healthcare landscape, underpinning the activist argument that healthcare as a whole is systemically racist.
Welcome to woke healthcare. It has no time for people of certain races, yet all the time in the world for divisive and discriminatory ideas. What just happened in Washington state is a sign of what’s quietly happening to healthcare across America. It needs to stop – now.
A Midwestern hospital chain recently put the kibosh on a key demand from radical activists. Missouri-based SSM Health reversed its plans to dole out COVID-19 treatments based in part on race. Physicians and patients alike should celebrate this victory over discrimination in healthcare.
SSM’s move came after the hospital initially jumped on the discrimination bandwagon. During the COVID spike late last year, activists pushed to get hospitals and other medical providers to take race into account when distributing monoclonal antibody treatments. Specifically, they wanted to force physicians to give more treatments to minority patients, while withholding those treatments from others.
That’s discrimination – and that was the point. The divisive ideology behind this policy explicitly holds that skin color should determine who gets medical care. Yet that cuts at the heart of health care. Patients should get the best medical care regardless of who they are, what they look like, or where they come from. Each and every patient deserves personalized care, without exception.
SSM’s decision is a victory for fairness. It’s also proof that concerned Americans can drive positive change. The hospital chain took action after receiving a letter from a public interest group in Wisconsin, where it operates eight facilities. The about-face should inspire more physicians and patients to speak out and oppose radical ideology at every level of healthcare.
After all, this Midwestern hospital isn’t the only one trying to discriminate by race. And it’s not the only one where public pressure can make a difference.
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.
Radical ideology is at risk of being embedded in medical school curriculum nationwide. Recent reports indicate that the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is developing educational standards that will force students to learn – and professors to teach – ideas grounded in “anti-racism.” Make no mistake: This is a corruption of medical training.
Specifically, the AAMC is developing competencies that medical students must demonstrate in order to graduate. According to the most recent drafts, they must be able to explain how patients “present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege.” They must also be able to discuss how “white privilege, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, religious oppression” affect patient “health outcomes.” Less clear is how medical students should actually help their patients lead healthier lives.
Similarly, medical school faculty must be “role models” who “engage in reflective practices related to individual identities, power, and privileges.” And they must inform student “clinical decision making and practice” according to ideology, not sound medical standards. Practically speaking, these competencies mean professors must teach students to discriminate on the basis of race, which is utterly unacceptable and dangerous to patient health.
If these standards move forward, the next generation of medical professionals will be activists first and foremost. In fact, the AMMC competencies make that clear by calling on medical students to learn “system level strategies to remedy the impact of systems of oppression on health and health care.” That’s the last thing we need at any medical school, much less all of them.
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Are America’s physicians inherently biased against minority patients? It’s a central claim of the radical activists who want to fundamentally remake healthcare along divisive, discriminatory lines. Yet there’s no credible evidence that such bias exists. In fact, the psychology test behind this claim has been roundly repudiated.
The “Implicit Association Test” (IAT) purports to show that people have deep-seated racial bias, regardless of whether they realize it. Developed a few decades ago, the test has been used to cast doubt on the fairness of many institutions and industries, healthcare included. Yet only recently have scholars and experts begun to critically evaluate the test’s quality. Their findings: The IAT test is anything but accurate.
A thorough review of the literature makes clear: “The IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. [It] is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes.” Furthermore, it “was released to the public and excitedly publicized long before it had been fully validated in the rigorous, careful way normally demanded by the field of psychology.”
The IAT test’s shortcomings are so severe that even its own creators have acknowledged its insufficiency. Yet despite these facts, activists continue to claim that physicians are inherently biased and healthcare must be revolutionized to root out that bias.
This radical, fact-free campaign must be stopped. While bias is a possibility, physicians’ professionalism is a reality. They work tirelessly to meet the needs of each and every patient, regardless of skin color. They should be applauded, not attacked, and healthcare should be improved, not undermined.
What’s the main mission of the federal Department of Health and Human Services? On paper, it’s supposed to be “improving the health, safety, and well-being of America.” But HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra has a different, and much more radical, answer: Put race at the center of health care.
Look no further than Sec. Becerra’s press conference on the anniversary of his confirmation. He said that “health equity pervades everything” his department is doing. While that may sound harmless, it is a fundamental rejection of core American principles, and a fundamental assault on the health and well-being HHS is supposed to promote. “Health equity” requires looking at everything through the lens of race. Worse, it demands that race determine patients’ access to and quality of care, based on the false assumption that different health outcomes are the result of supposedly racist doctors .
The proof is in HHS’ new policy of bribing doctors with higher Medicare payments to develop “anti-racism plans.” In practice, that means providing preferential care to minority patients, while deprioritizing care for others. By eroding doctors’ ability to provide personalized care to the patient in front of them, HHS is injuring people’s health.
The White House has also directed HHS to develop a “Health Equity Task Force.” The task force will soon issue recommendations centered on “mitigating inequities” and “preventing such inequities in the future.” You can bet the recommendations will involve more race-based care and less focus on the specific needs of individual patients.
None of this fits with the real mission of HHS. It should be striving to give everyone access to world-class health care, while unleashing the innovation that will make our medical system even better. Instead, under Sec. Becerra, HHS is focused on some patients to the exclusion of others. Whatever else that is, it isn’t the health care that Americans expect and deserve.
The American Medical Association (AMA) has officially endorsed racial discrimination. That’s the takeaway from a recent legal filing by the AMA, which represents more than 240,000 doctors. It marks a dangerous turn for the storied institution, which is undermining patient well-being while claiming to promote it.
The AMA’s filing is in support of New York’s policy requiring medical professionals to allocate scarce COVID-19 treatments on the basis of race. Such a policy was previously unheard of, for good reason: It forces doctors to change their standard of care based on a patient’s skin color. The name for that is discrimination, and it has no place in the doctor’s office.
The AMA’s filing is filled with “anti-racist” jargon. It tries to justify the New York policy on the grounds that “numerous social drivers of health” – including “inequitable living, working, and other life conditions” – “have historically prevented people of color, and Black individuals in particular, from having the same opportunities to attain good physical health as white individuals.” Yet there is no credible evidence that biased care by physicians contributes to the disparities in clinical outcomes for minority patients, so there is no justification for doling out treatments based on race. Doctors want and work hard to provide the best and most personalized care to all their patients. They don’t want to help some at the expense of others.
The AMA is supporting New York even after other states, like Minnesota and Utah, have dropped similar discriminatory policies. The AMA should be ashamed. And racial discrimination in health care should be stopped, for the sake of patients of every color.
The Hippocratic Oath is at the heart of health care. New physicians have always repeated its promise to “do no harm.” Yet radical activism is leading to efforts to “update” the oath – and ultimately undermine it.
Look no further than Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. At the start of the most recent school year, 140 incoming medical students donned their doctor’s coats and made a solemn pledge. Yet unlike every class that came before, these medical students wrote their own version of the Hippocratic Oath.
Instead of promising to “do no harm,” these future doctors vowed to “disrupt… injustices.” They also said: “I acknowledge the past and present failures of medicine to abide by its obligation to do no harm and affirm the need to address systemic issues.” This language reflects medical education’s embrace of Critical Race Theory, which holds that doctors should give preferential treatment to patients based on skin color, while deprioritizing care for others.
Such discrimination is the way to do harm – the opposite of a doctor’s oath.
The damage will constantly be reinforced as these students progress through Columbia, which has committed to making Critical Race Theory a foundational part of its curriculum. Yet the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t need to be updated, and its core promise to “do no harm” should never be discarded. Just the opposite: Future and current physicians should be looking for new to fulfill that promise and improve patients’ lives.