Embrace of woke identity politics in healthcare required for medical school
America is obsessed with identity politics, the belief that laws, regulations, and policies boil down to cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, religious, or social interests; evidence of this reality can be seen in the Far-Left’s promotion of white privilege, Critical Race Theory, Marxism, radical feminism, and the LGBT agenda. Now, however, the embrace of identity politics in healthcare is required for those wanting to attend medical school.
The best medical schools in the country are weeding out applicants who fail to embrace identity politics and are insufficiently devoted to the leftist creed of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), according to a report released by the non-profit Do No Harm (via National Review):
Do No Harm, a nonprofit dedicated to “protect[ing] healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology,” conducted an analysis of medical school application processes which found that these selective institutions are raising an additional barrier to entry on top of the strenuous testing and grade requirements.
“A review of the admissions process at 50 of the top-ranked medical schools found that 36 asked applicants their views on, or experience in, DEI efforts,” reads the Do No Harm report, which was obtained by National Review. “Many were overt in asking applicants if they agreed with certain statements about racial politics and the causes of disparate health outcomes.”
According to the report, medical schools are asking these questions in order to “turn ideological support for health equity and social justice initiatives into a credential that increases an applicant’s chance of acceptance,” “screen out dissenters,” and “signal to all applicants that they are expected to support this new cause.”
“Top medical schools have woven their commitment to woke politics into their application process, asking future doctors to prove their commitment to divisive ideologies or risk being rejected from medical school.” concludes the report.
The University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine, for example, professes to be interested in combating all forms of systemic “barriers” and entreats applicants to share their “thoughts on opposing… systemic racism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and misogyny.”
“How will you contribute?” the application asks.
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School asks prospective attendees to “describe an interaction or experience that has made you more sensitive or appreciative of cultural differences, and/ or how you have committed yourself to understanding and aiding in the pursuit of equity and inclusion in your academic, professional or personal life.”
At the University of Minnesota, applicants are first told that “our country is reckoning with its history, racism, racial injustice, and especially anti-black racism.” Then they’re asked to share their “reflections on, experiences with, and greatest lessons learned about systemic racism.”
And at the University of Miami, applicants are bluntly queried about what they have “done to help identify, address and correct an issue of systemic discrimination?” None of the aforementioned schools responded to a request for comment. (Emphasis mine)
We shouldn’t be surprised that identity politics has replaced wanting to cure the sick and afflicted when it comes to America’s healthcare system; it’s been an inevitability ever since Barack Obama and the Democrats created Obamacare as the first step to a government-run healthcare. And since the free market is a tool of white entitlement, it’s obviously racist and must be destroyed to fix any “inequities” within the healthcare system.
Obama often resorted to race-baiting when he lacked a legitimate defense of one his policies, and healthcare was no exception. Shortly after his reelection, Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, gave a speech at an NAACP convention and compared opposition to Obamacare to opposition of Civil Rights laws passed in the 1960s.
During his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama was heralded by Newsweek as America’s “First Gay President” following his so-called evolution on the subject of same-sex marriage — he was for it before he was against it before he was for it — and he engaged in a little identity politics by mixing the LGBT agenda with Obamacare.
Near the end of his second term, Obama issued a series of executive orders endorsing transgender “rights” in public schools, including mandates that Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare cover sex-change procedures.
Obama is also a self-declared feminist who believes in the importance of destroying “traditional” gender roles because it’s wrong to raise girls to look and behave in a certain way. This led to mixing Obamacare and abortion to promote the idea of murdering late-term babies to save the government money.
Now that Obama’s former partner-in-crime, Joe Biden, is calling the shots, we are seeing a revival of mixing identity politics and Obamacare, a revival that got its legs thanks to COVID tyranny.
In February 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released Sexual Orientation Disparities in Risk Factors for Adverse COVID-19–Related Outcomes, by Race/Ethnicity — Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, United States, 2017–2019. The study was conducted because “Inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity data in COVID-19 surveillance and other data collections could improve knowledge about disparities in infections and adverse outcomes among sexual and gender minority populations, overall and by race/ethnicity.”
In May 2022, the National Institutes of Health released Racism, Violence, COVID-19, and Public Health, a report that concluded that systemic and structural racism had negatively affected many residents of Black communities during the so-called pandemic. This led the Presidential COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force to direct money and other resources to promote public health in Black and other underserved communities.
The most notable application of identity politics to the healthcare issue is Joe Biden’s plan to “update” Title IX regulations (via National Review):
A different federal law, Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded health-care programs or activities, does so by incorporating Title IX’s prohibition against sex discrimination. Thus, whatever Title IX regulations say about sex discrimination in the education context will have a direct impact on the medical profession.
If adopted, Biden’s Title IX regulations would greatly expand the scope of what is considered sex discrimination. Perhaps most significantly, sex discrimination would be radically defined and expanded to include discrimination based on “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy” (which covers elective abortions). Not only would this proposal have a negative impact on women’s bathrooms, dorm rooms, and sports teams, but with Title IX’s direct implications on 1557’s interpretation and enforcement, it could have dire consequences for the medical profession.
Indeed, other recently proposed regulations directly on 1557 by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would mirror the definition of sex discrimination in the proposed Title IX regulations.
Under the proposed 1557 regulations, it would be illegal to “deny or limit health services sought for purposes of gender transition or other gender-affirming care that the covered entity would provide to an individual for other purposes if the denial or limitation is based on a patient’s sex assigned at birth, gender identity, or gender otherwise recorded.” In short, doctors and hospitals would be required to provide patients, including children, with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender transition surgeries. And insurance providers would be required to cover these expensive drugs and procedures. (Emphasis mine)
In retrospect, one has to wonder if medical schools would be forcing identity politics on future healthcare professionals if Donald Trump and the Republican Party had kept their oft-repeated promise to repeal Obamacare.
I guess we’ll never know.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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