DEI is coming for your health care, and maybe even your wellbeing. America’s best health care systems are today segregating or excluding some people from life-saving applications based on race in the name of “equity.” These innovative initiatives represent a risky era for American health care, where preference for cultural organizations is the norm.  ,  ,  ,
Consider Cleveland Clinic, for example. This world-class health care system runs a” Minority Men’s Health Center” and a” Minority Stroke Program” for addressing various health problems, including stroke, diabetes, and another injury risk factors, people’s health conditions, and various mental health problems. These programs tout a range of benefits from disease prevention and treatment to specific providers, travel assistance, prescription help, support groups, and education events.
These are top-notch applications. But they’re “tailored” to immigrants. For instance, the Minority Stroke Program’s reported focus and purpose is “preventing and treating injury in racial and ethnic minorities”. And so minorities ( and only minorities ) are encouraged to reach out to the” Minority Stroke Program team” to set up an appointment.
Cleveland Clinic’s Minority Stroke Program appears to be alive at this time, despite a new challenge to these race-based plans evidently causing the facility to slowly remove all traces from its website.
Cleveland Clinic asserts that its culturally special stroke program helps individuals” who need it most” and that it is necessary to combat racial disparities. Black and Latino people, for example, view worse injury results on average.
But if treating these cultural differences is a true aim, then why not another differences? Europeans are more likely to suffer from Parkinson’s, visual degradation, Type 1 diabetes, COPD, body cancers, severe disease, osteoarthritis, and MS, just to name a few. If Cleveland Clinic start a MS program for white people? Of course no.
The issue with these racist health equity types is that they use race as a proxies for real health risks. A higher rate of injury in a particular culture does not necessarily imply that race itself is the cause of strokes. A leading study of racial differences in stroke results identifies various risk and potential components: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease or other cardiovascular-related problems, smoking, low socioeconomic status ( such as education level ), obesity or physical inactivity, disease, vascular elements, sleep disruption, and mental health. Race is not on the record.
Race-based wellness equity initiatives, like Cleveland Clinic’s programs (among people at Mayo Clinic, and other major networks ), treat differences, not people. These programs are designed to examine health outcomes through the lens of race and assume that a doctor needs to know about who needs medical attention the most from their own experiences.
But beyond race, any number of demographic filters could be applied concerning almost any characteristic to compare and address health outcomes — to name a few, height, eye color, birth order, handedness, where one lives, and so forth. The mere existence of any given demographic factor does not constitute a valid or valid standard for determining health outcomes.
Studies have shown that other factors relating to social support systems, neighborhood factors, education, employment, and other novel variables that must be understood and accounted for are barriers that can transcend racial lines and be responsible for disparities in health outcomes.
Those who are most in need of care are not helped by discounting relevant and legitimate factors and variables for health risks and outcomes in exchange for a simple, blind deference to skin pigmentation for the purpose of balancing broad racial disparities. Rather, this approach invokes guesswork that is the product of broad racial stereotyping.
Racial health equity schemes are not only wrongheaded, but also illegal. Health care providers receiving federal funding for health care may not discriminate based on race in accordance with the broad protections provided by the Affordable Care Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This implies that health care providers are not permitted to segregate care, impose racial preferences, or implement programs that are racially motivated to provide services to some in a different way from those to others.
Unsurprisingly, the Biden-Harris administration has been on this bandwagon from the get-go. On his first day in office, President Biden signed several executive orders mandating race-based initiatives. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ( CMS ) recently released a proposed rule that would allow and encourage a racially discriminatory system for distributing kidney transplants and related services in line with this racial equity agenda. In a public comment, we’ve condemned this proposed rule.
Unfortunately, however, for the last decade, the race-conscious 2014 Kidney Allocation System has been working to reduce racial disparities in organ transplantation. And according to studies, this system has succeeded in its intended purpose, reducing the transplant rates for white people while increasing the rate for some racial minorities.
While some may call these efforts “progress”, in truth, race-based equity initiatives are nothing more than an illegal endeavor to balance mortality and morbidity according to an individual’s skin pigmentation. Patients are not treated as individuals, but as mere representatives of their race.
No matter how well-intentioned, racial balancing in health care is not medicine — it is politics. Whether or not a particular patient should be prioritized or included in medical care and care does not change because a patient is the wrong color. Empowering balancing efforts brought on by identity politics have no place in medicine.
Patients and their families should be on the lookout for these initiatives, and they should oppose those that promote racial harmony and undermine individualized medicine. Health care systems cannot be accessible, robust, and effective, without the fundamental guarantee of equality for all.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law &, Liberty is led by Dan Lennington and Cara Tolliver as attorneys.
