Med school quota in Obamacare bill

[Don Dresden]

The Democrats Won’t Talk About This Provision

Mona Charen
March 12, 2010 12:00 A.M.

The House version of the health-care bill mandates racial and gender quotas — in perpetuity.
  

On March 9, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said:

You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future. . . . We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.

Pity the Democrats. They just can’t get their message out. Not with a charismatic president (who has delivered 52 speeches on the subject), control of both houses of Congress, the gooey enthusiasm of 90 percent of the press, and more than a year of ceaseless agitation. Their efforts have been thwarted, as they imagine it, by “misinformation,” “distortion,” and the “special interests.” So influential are these dark forces that the leadership cannot shout over them. Speaker Pelosi must pass the grossly unpopular bill in order to get the peace and quiet she needs to explain its virtues.

In fact, on this legislation’s most important variable — cost — Americans see through the optimistic projections. Asked by Rasmussen whether the health-care plan will cost more than currently estimated, 81 percent of voters said yes and 66 percent said it was “very likely” to exceed projections. Doubtless the Democrats can explain that Americans believe this only because they’ve been duped by lies and clever ad campaigns, not because 60 years of recent history demonstrate conclusively that government programs, particularly open-ended entitlements, nearly always exceed projected costs. In 1966, Medicare cost taxpayers $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that by 1990, we might be spending as much as $12 billion. The actual 1990 figure: $107 billion. In 1987, Congress estimated that the Medicaid DSH (disproportionate share hospital) costs would be less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost: $17 billion.

But since Speaker Pelosi is so eager for us to know the details, let’s indulge her. Among the specifications of the House bill that passed last November are several sections that mandate racial and ethnic quotas for medical schools and other federal contractors. As Allan Favish reported in The American Thinker, the bill specifies that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, “in awarding grants or contracts under this section . . . shall give preference to entities that have a demonstrated record of . . . training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

This, along with other provisions, is broad enough to cover every medical, nursing, and dental school and teaching hospital in the country and guarantees the institutionalization of racial, sex, and ethnic quotas in perpetuity (though the use of the word “underrepresented” before “minority” ensures that the quotas will not apply to Asians or Jews).

The rationale for these quotas, insofar as there is one, is that African-Americans and Hispanics have, on average, poorer health than other groups. Liberals assume that these disparities are the result of discrimination or lack of access to health care rather than other factors like poverty, eating habits, heredity, and fitness. If medical and dental schools are required to admit more minority applicants, newly minted minority professionals will tend to those “underserved” populations.

Of course, medical and dental schools have been practicing affirmative action for decades, but they’ve had trouble recruiting large numbers of minorities. Part of the problem is that African-Americans do not tend to gravitate to math and science (the solution to which is to be found in families and schools). Still, for the past few decades, less qualified minorities have been offered spots in medical schools, with the result that: 1) those minority professionals who would have qualified without affirmative action bear a stigma, and 2) less qualified minority graduates fail licensing exams at much higher rates than their classmates. Is it a service to the African-American or Hispanic communities to provide them with physicians and dentists who are less capable than others? Will it improve health outcomes for them to be treated by less qualified professionals?

President Obama asked this week whether anyone could oppose “holding insurance companies accountable” and “bringing down costs for everyone.” Funny, he doesn’t ask whether we object to this: a provision on “maintaining, collecting and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity” in order to “facilitate and coordinate identification and monitoring . . . of health disparities to inform program and policy efforts to reduce such disparities.” That’s an engraved invitation to social engineering.

But then, even to mention it is probably contributing to the “fog of controversy.”

[Don Dresden]

Healthcare reform - no place for racial quotas

Jim Brown - OneNewsNow - 8/12/2009 8:50:00 AM

A former attorney with the Justice Department says the House healthcare bill pushes hospitals, medical schools, and other recipients of federal dollars to meet racial and ethnic quotas.

The Washington Times reported this week that four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights want President Obama and Congress to rewrite some "little-noticed" provisions of the healthcare bill that factor in race when awarding billions of dollars in contracts, scholarships, and grants. In its letter outlining the request, the Commission quotes a Harvard medical researcher who said the notion that bridging the health status gap by expanding the number of minority physicians and providing culture-related training is "grounded in hope more than science."

Concurring with that stance is Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He says it is ridiculous -- and unconstitutional -- for medical schools and hospitals to weigh skin color or ethnic background when admitting students or hiring doctors.

"Of all the professions where people are least likely to care about the person's skin color and are most likely to want simply the best-qualified person working on them, it would have to be healthcare -- it would have to be doctors and nurses," says Clegg.

The Center spokesman contends that few people are concerned about the "color" of their doctor. "If he's about to cut you open, we just want to make sure that he's got the best training possible and he's the best-qualified person possible," he offers.

Clegg argues most Americans believe society has "long since reached the point where we ought to be putting race and ethnicity behind us and just hiring the most qualified people."  Clegg says the racial preference provisions in the healthcare bill are just another example of the politically correct, left-wing ideology promoted in the entire bill.

[Armando Ramos]

"Of all the professions where people are least likely to care about the person's skin color and are most likely to want simply the best-qualified person working on them, it would have to be healthcare -- it would have to be doctors and nurses," says Clegg.

The Center spokesman contends that few people are concerned about the "color" of their doctor. "If he's about to cut you open, we just want to make sure that he's got the best training possible and he's the best-qualified person possible," he offers.

You might remember the poster child for affirmative action in medical schools, the utterly incompetent Dr. Patrick Chavis.

Affirmative Action Turns Lives Into Tragedies

By Marianne M. Jennings

September 9, 2002

Editorial

Dr. Patrick Chavis, 50, was fatally shot by foiled carjackers as he returned to his auto following a stop for ice cream in Hawthorne, Calif. Chavis was infamous, having been admitted to UC Davis medical school in 1973 under a special program that enrolled five black applicants who had lower scores than Allan Bakke, a white male denied admission.

Bakke challenged the admissions program and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bakke's favor; Davis had committed a constitutional no-no. Bakke is now a respected anesthesiologist in Rochester, Minn. Chavis' life was a Shakespearean tragedy because of affirmative action. While Sen. Ted Kennedy, the New York Times, the Nation and all network news programs profiled Dr. Chavis as an example of what affirmative action can do, there are some data discrepancies.

Chavis had no business being a doctor. Upon completion of his residency in 1981 at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, he was hired there at a low level. He shouted racism and was promoted to associate staff physician. But by 1988, hospital staffers monitored his work after a panel of physicians and administrators reprimanded him for a forceps delivery.

Chavis cried racism again through a discrimination suit. A jury awarded him $1.1 million (later overturned). Chavis then undertook the noble arts of abortions and liposuctions, or "body sculpting," as he called it. He was sued for malpractice 27 times, had medical board complaints filed in seven liposuction cases and was accused of causing the death of one liposuction patient whom he left in his office as her incisions oozed red fluid.

The patient died there of "massive blood loss." A tape made during his liposuction procedures finds "horrific screaming" by his patients as Chavis offers this bedside banter, "Don't talk to the doctor while he is working," and "Liar, liar, pants on fire." A judge suspended his license in 1997, writing in an 11-page opinion that Chavis "demonstrates an inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician."

The Medical Board of California revoked his license in 1998 for "gross negligence, incompetence and repeated negligent acts." Dr. Chavis blamed racist "white male" physicians for his problems. Kennedy called him a "successful OB/GYN in central Los Angeles." Sure, if "successful" means death and dismemberment. Chavis was a disgrace to the medical profession. But his disgrace is a byproduct of affirmative action.

When professional programs admit the less qualified or unqualified, they wreak havoc. Yet 25 years after the Bakke case, universities still use these two-track admissions programs that offer special treatment for minorities. The U.S. Supreme Court's October term finds another appeal on Michigan's law school's admissions program, by Jennifer Gratz, who points out that 46 minorities with scores equal to or less than hers were admitted while she was rejected. Women suing because minorities are given more affirmative action?

The data are irrefutable that minority law school graduates fail bar exams at a significantly higher rate. Special admissions give them the right to flunk the bar exam. But affirmative action carries more insidious harms. When race is the deciding factor in admissions, it becomes the deciding factor in all subsequent decisions. Chavis had a long history of botched doctoring but continued practicing medicine because each time someone threw down the penalty flag, he cried, "Racist!" I have taught both white and minority students who had no business being in graduate school.

I trounce the white students but hold only whispered conversations about marginal minority students. Minority students survive because to call them unqualified or fail them is to risk charges of racism. The failure to fail brands those minority students who earned their slots.

We diminish their stature, just as Chaviz, with his very public declarations about race and the glories of affirmative action, diminished competent minority physicians. In our candid subliminal minds, affirmative action makes us look at minority physicians and lawyers thinking, "Got in under special admissions, huh?" The beauty of affirmative action for the incompetent, inept and unqualified is that our misgivings remain unspoken.

Affirmative action deepens the racial divide because it eliminates merit. In colleges, a white with a 1200-1248 SAT score has a 19.3 percent chance of admission while a minority candidate with that score has a 60 percent chance. Enter arbitrariness and the rage of injustice whites feel but will not express owing to political correctness. Repression builds resentment. That racial divide grows.

The strongest and the swiftest win the slots only in the NFL and NBA. Affirmative action's underlying assumption insults every minority. To say that minority candidates require special admissions presumes that these candidates cannot compete on their own. Such an assumption is wrong, racist, and, as Chavis' life showed, deadly.

[Dennis Ruhl]

Equality of sexes?  How are you going to explain to a young lady with an A average that she missed out on medical school because a B average guy was let in.  What about the C average guy in nursing?

In Canada native people get light jail sentences reflecting the supposed fact that they suffer discrimination.  And who are they maiming, killing, etc.? - other natives.  So we are continuing our discrimination by failing to protect the law abiding natives.

Sounds a lot like providing substandard medical care to blacks in general by lowering standards for the few.

[ham]

Right or wrong, it's YOUR country, right?
Wrong?
This utter nonsense has shaped the world since 1945...that's the great USA gift to the world, because CIA and the space program were engineered with fugitive Nazis at the core.
I mean, criticizing this obsession with racial congregation and social engineering is criticizing the very pillars on which the USA rest since 1865.