Minority Contracting Comes to Medicine


When public hospitals purchase medical equipment or rely on outside doctors, they typically consider the price and quality of each vendor.

In Tarrant County, Texas, they consider something else, too: the race and gender of the vendor’s owners.

Tarrant County’s public hospital system, JPS Health, evaluates bids for contracts on a 100-point scale that gives more weight to “diversity and inclusion” (15 points) than to the reputation of a vendor’s goods and services (10 points) when assessing providers of transcatheter heart valves—devices used to counteract cardiac failure and keep blood flowing throughout the body.

Read more on the Washington Free Beacon.