In an official civil rights issue released on Wednesday by the anti-discrimination care organization Do No Harm ( DNH), Cleveland Clinic, which is widely regarded as the world’s top-performing doctor, is accused of racial discrimination.  ,
The Minority Men’s Health Center and the Minority Stroke Program at the clinic, according to the complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, engage in unfair behavior. The center is funded by the government and is content to anti-discrimination laws that prohibit for activities.
The health care professionals and patients of DNH, who” ]seek ] to keep identity politics out of medical education, research, and clinical practice”, are represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law &, Liberty ( WILL).
In the formal complaint letter, WILL Associate Counsel Cara Tolliver and Deputy Counsel Daniel P. Lennington wrote that” [e]nding the maintenance efforts described by the patient’s specific injury and men’s health plans to all people who need it may be commendable.” Instead,” These programs have been plagued by a racial paradox, in which patients are prioritized and cared for, and which shifts the otherwise commendable goal of helping society equally, without respect to one’s race,” he writes.
Tolliver spoke with The Federalist about the true repercussions of the DNH’s aims to stop racial discrimination in healthcare.
These are regular people seeking treatment for stroke and a variety of other health conditions, and they are encountering these cultural preferences for programs that might be very good, and being confronted by the fact that Cleveland Clinic does not see or prioritize or often treatment for all of its patients equally, without regard to race, Tolliver explained.
Discriminatory Courses
The patient’s Minority Stroke Program is “focused on preventing and treating injury in racial and ethnic minorities”, according to the health agency’s site. The program emphasizes the treatment of black and Latino adults and offers” ]r ] eferrals to other medical providers”,” transportation assistance for in-person appointments”, and” community education events”, among other specialized services.  ,
A 2022 Cleveland Clinic content reveals that the system goals” East Cleveland, a society where 90 % of people are Black”.
The system is led by Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine’s Professor of Neurology Gwendolyn Lynch, a strokes professional.
The Minority Men’s Health Center is also biased. The patient’s website specifies that the core “addresses ] the health problems that particularly affect African American and Hispanic males.” Additionally, it states that the program was established to “address health discrepancies in minority groups.”
Like the Minority Stroke Program, the Minority Men’s Health Center provides a wide array of services, including heath examination, primary care, “referrals for specific care”, “prescription help”, and” religious care”.
Do No Harm hopes that the doctor will give up its race-based focus and motivation in these programs and make them accessible to everyone, according to Tolliver, according to Tolliver. They should n’t be offering separate services based on a patient’s skin pigmentation, or segregating their services.
Patients who are reportedly impacted by racist laws that prevent white patients from receiving these services are being brought under the radar by the DNH.  ,
” Race prejudice is a defining feature of these courses, and this prejudice is current and ongoing”, Tolliver and Lennington wrote in the problem. ” Everyday citizens in search of help … are faced with the fact that the doctor does not view, promote, market, or otherwise treatment for all people equally, in the same manner, without regard to competition”.
Treating People as People
The center uses divergent stroke rates and other risk factors to justify racial bias in its medical programs. Its net information “deaths from injury are two times higher in Black Americans than in American total” and “nearly one-third of Latinos have insulin”, among other data.  ,
In response to the initiative to balance health disparities, WILL attorneys emphasized that “anti-discrimination laws require treating patients as individuals”.
As Jim Crow segregations could not use race to allocate goods or services, Cleveland Clinic may not assume that a person needs a particular kind of care effort based on race, nor do its best to maintain a “proper” racial balance, according to Tolliver and Lennington. Treating individual patients as racial archetypes to “fix” group differences is beyond the remit of a healthcare organization, and in any case, it is against the law.
Cleveland Clinic is accused of violating ACA Section 1557 and Title VI in the complaint.
Like the clinic, Title VI outlaws racial discrimination against those who receive federal funding. In particular, the Cleveland Clinic is prohibited from “providing services or benefits in a different manner from those provided to others,”” [s ] egregate or separately treat individuals in any matter relating to the receipt of any service or other benefit,” or “rest its actions on any racially discriminatory purpose or intention.”
The ACA prohibits racial discrimination in “any health initiative or activity, whose implementation is covered by Federal funding assistance.”
WILL attorneys argue that the clinic’s racially distinguished initiatives amount to” separate but equal” patient treatment, which has been illegal since 1954.
“]T] he underlying goals … rest on an impermissible interest’ in race for race’s sake’— aiming to balance the scales of mortality and morbidity with nothing more than a bare reliance on a patient’s skin pigmentation”, Tolliver and Lennington wrote.
Hospital Executives
In a separate notice of complaint sent on Wednesday, WILL notified Cleveland Clinic CEO and president Tomislav Mihaljevic and chair of the board of directors Beth Mooney.  ,
In the notice, Tolliver and Lennington wrote that using race as a proxy for legitimate health risks is a dangerous practice because” a human being is not more or less healthy than that,” according to Tolliver and Lennington. ” Cleveland Clinic should be operating its programming in a manner that equally prioritizes, promotes, pursues, and includes all at-risk patients, without reliance on racial stereotyping and segregated, distinctions”.
The Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services may begin an investigation into the Cleveland Clinic following the official complaint.
Tolliver stressed that the Cleveland Clinic has a duty to take action, despite telling The Federalist that DNH hopes the Cleveland Clinic will put an end to racial discrimination without further action.
” If Cleveland Clinic determines, in the meantime, to remove those racial motivations and the biases for its programs in favor of an approach of an equal approach to patient care, without regard to race, we will, of course, immediately withdraw the complaint”, Tolliver said. Our hope is that it will be as simple as that and that they will act responsibly in this situation. So the ball will … be in their court and we will proceed accordingly”.
With degrees in journalism and political science, Monroe Harless recently graduated from the University of Georgia.
