Investigation: Increasing Push For “Prioritizing Non-Whites for Medical Care to Compensate for Historical Wrongs”
Real Clear Investigations: “Doctors are questioning the concept of colorblindness in patient care as a racist holdover that benefits white people.”
If you thought Critical Race critiques of mathematics as a tool of white supremacy were bad, just wait until you read what’s happening in the medical ethics field.
In a prior post, we reported on the first two parts in an investigation by John Murawski at Real Clear Investigations, Investigation: Medical Education And Research Crumbling Under Racial Identity Politics.
You can read Murkowski’s reports here:
- Medicine Is Getting Major Injections of Woke Ideology (Part 1)
- As Race ‘Equity’ Advances in Health Care, Signs of a Chilling Effect on Dissent (Part 2)
Murkowski recently released his third and in some ways most troubling report in the series, Doctors’ Dilemma: Replacing Colorblindness to Favor Minority Care (Part 3):
Doctors are questioning the concept of colorblindness in patient care as a racist holdover that benefits white people. And some openly acknowledge that prioritizing non-whites for medical care to compensate for historical wrongs may result in a greater loss of life. But increasingly they say that society must take this route as a matter of medical ethics.
The colorblind standard, which says that race is an irrelevant consideration in providing medical treatment, has come under intense scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately sickened and killed people of color.
Numerous academic papers reassessed the moral logic of triage, which sets policy on prioritizing emergency care, as coronavirus deaths surged and medical ethicists grappled with the moral tradeoffs of allocating scarce resources….
Murkowski meticulously goes through the recent medical literature that led to his conclusions quoted above. You should read the whole thing, including a papers by prestigious medical ethicists which Murkowski summarizes as follows:
Thus saving as many lives as possible in a colorblind manner becomes a classic example of systemic racism: a neutral standard that benefits white people. That’s because people of color, with lower life expectancies, are more likely to be downgraded in priority for emergency lifesaving measures.
“In our view, when society is substantially responsible for creating disparities through unfair social policies, there is a special obligation to prioritize disparity mitigation,” they wrote, “even if doing so results in somewhat fewer overall lives saved compared with purely utilitarian triage.”
What is the ideology driving the push for race-based triage. You may have heard of it, Critical Race Theory:
Coinciding with the rise of Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd, the pandemic’s unequal death rates jolted medical ethicists to rethink how doctors and hospitals should prioritize the distribution of ventilators, intensive care beds and coronavirus vaccines.
The reevaluation of racially neutral standards as inherently discriminatory could ultimately expand to other areas of medicine as medical ethicists adopt critical race theory and assess the allocation of medical care through the prism of “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “implicit bias.”
“To achieve equitable access and distribution of care, critical race theory must be a part of the process utilized to create broad, population-focused guidelines,” four doctors wrote in a Health Affairs article last year.
Murkowski goes through a litany of news reports and other medical writings and concludes:
One of the authors, Michelle Morse, is the chief medical officer of the New York City Health Department. The other author, Bram Wispelwey, is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and also co-founder and chief strategist of Health for Palestine.
“The stubborn persistence of racial inequities – both in health care and across society at large – gives the lie to the effectiveness of colorblind policies,” they wrote.
They acknowledge that offering preferential care based on race may prompt legal challenges, but they say there is ample evidence that the current societal systems “already unfairly preference people who are white.” They further note: “Our approach is corrective and therefore mandated.”
It’s not clear the extent to which race-based triage and treatment actually has taken hold. It would present a medical malpractice legal risk of almost infinite proportions. But as we’ve seen elsewhere in society, once a CRT worldview takes hold in an institution, what once seemed insane becomes commonplace.
So depending on the melanin in your skin, the doctor may or may not see you now.
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So depending on the melanin in your skin, the doctor may or may not see you now.
Meh. What we are actually moving towards is a political test for receiving medical treatment. You can bet any Communist Party politician/official/doner/voter would get first priority – regardless of the color of their skin. The same will soon be true for opportunities in higher education, jobs, banking, and (soon) even access to food, water and shelter. Stolen elections have consequences.
But at least there are no more mean Tweets, amirite!?!?
Exactly. All the Obamacare programs dropped money into the system for more operations for the poor. But, they never provided for more surgeons or operating rooms. So, someone gets to choose which patients get the new hips, and knees, etc.
“Doctors are questioning the concept of colorblindness in patient care as a racist holdover that benefits white people. And some openly acknowledge that prioritizing non-whites for medical care to compensate for historical wrongs may result in a greater loss of life. But increasingly they say that society must take this route as a matter of medical ethics.”
Hmmm.. “Doctors” are questioning? Which ones? Reverse discrimination in healthcare is a disgusting concept. “… As a matter of medical ethics”? That’s not the medical ethics I learned in medical school.
Some of us have been too busy taking care of patients to notice the creeping wokeness as it works its way into medicines. We’re not members of the AMA, and their politics don’t speak for us. Unfortunately though too many of my colleagues have allowed the Overton window to move far enough that they think this is ok. It’s not.
Let me get this straight.
My medical care has to be delayed possibly risking my life or my health because of what some people 100+ years ago did or did not do.
This does not survive the “shone on the other foot” test. If doctors told Black patients they have to wait because their ancestors 100+ years ago did something – we would have riots and arson and maybe a real insurrection.
But Whites are supposed to take it because of some flimsy argument that they should take this shit out of guilt ? ? ?
Well, I do not feel guilty for what happened 100+ years ago. But I do feel ashamed of what this country has turned into. And ashamed for people of all races who cannot see that this is actual racism – making decisions on the basis of a persons skin color.
There is enough medical care available in this country to treat all of our citizens without priortizing according to skin color or anything else if we give priority to our own people—if our own country takes care of our own citizens. But we don’t have enough resources available to take care of everybody on planet earth.
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No. Your medical care has to be delayed possibly risking your life or health because of what our whole society is purportedly doing now.
Black people now, on average, have poorer health and shorter life expectancies than white people, on average, and the only possible explanation, in these people’s minds, is “systemic racism”.
It’s completely impossible and unthinkable that there might be physical differences, genetic differences, that cause these statistical disparities. It is possible and thinkable that these health disparities are caused entirely by economic disparities, but that’s no help because those disparities must be caused by racism.
And if we can’t detect conscious racism that causes it, then it must be caused by “systemic” racism. “Systemic racism” plays a role in CRT much like that which dark matter plays in astrophysics. We can’t detect it, we don’t know anything about it, but we know it’s there because it must be. All our explanations for how the universe works require there to be about seven times more mass than we can detect, so there must be enormous amounts of mass lurking around that we can’t detect.
The same with racism. People of all races are completely equal in all respects. Therefore when we look at large numbers of people there ought not to be any statistical disparities between the races. The fact that we do see such disparities is enough to prove that there must be “dark racism” lurking about somewhere. But since that term itself sounds racist, we call it “systemic racism”, and if those physicists weren’t such racists they’d call it “systemic matter”.
And that is critical racial theory in a nutshell. A very nutty shell.
mr. milhouse, in the early 70’s we were assured that affirmative action would right all perceived wrongs, much like Lyndon B. Johnson’s “great society” was touted to do before that. Neither one has been the boon to mankind….just a series of boondoggles and wasted resources, both human and financial. 50 years of these social experiments have shown the emptiness of leftist theories and leftist minds.
Blacks coined the term “Oreo” to encourage folks to ignore education, good manners, positive life choices (e.g.: not shooting each other, staying away from drugs, not committing crimes, two parent households, etc..), all of which affect happiness, prosperity and life expectancy, not to mention health care.
“Takin’ it to da man” has back-fired spectacularly. There are physical differences (sickle cell anemia, high blood-pressure, lack of prenatal care, “crack” babies, self-induced poverty by demonizing education, etc.), cultural differences and philosophical differences (marxism) being foisted upon Blacks by Blacks, who then fly first class and buy mansions for themselves. Each of these differences affects the frequency and efficacy of good health care.
After 50 years of watching abject failure predictably unfold, I (like Ben Kent) feel no guilt, just contempt for the gullible left, regardless of how much melanin they display, or what kind of acrobatics they use to blame me for their decisions. Except for the dangers crt poses to our national fabric, it is as you wrote….”A very nutty shell.” An empty nut shell.
A black friend of ours was told by her black friends that she was being “too white” for wanting to learn to play tennis.
“Black people now, on average, have poorer health and shorter life expectancies than white people.”
I don’t suppose diet, exercise, smoking, drinking, drugs and dying from violence have anything to do with it.
If so then those things must be caused by “systemic racism”, because what else could possibly cause them, given the axiom that there are no significant inherent differences between races. You won’t get anywhere arguing like this; it’s turtles all the way down.
“You won’t get anywhere arguing like this.”
I wasn’t arguing. I was supposing.
Milhouse, to be fair, there is no ‘argument’ in this. There are statements of opinion without any kind of logical basis, which cannot be refuted or the refute-er is promptly called all kinds of names and violently attacked.
Side note: we can detect dark matter by its gravity. We just don’t know what the heck it is.
As far as we can tell, it’s just floating blobs of gravity, kind of like if you had a spot in your living room that sucked up your coffee cups, and that’s all it did. It’s definitely there. It definitely does something. And, we have no idea what it really is.
And, just so, we can detect systemic racism by the existence of racial disparities. Because what else could explain them, given the axiom that there race is a social construct and therefore there are no significant natural differences between races?
Now have fun with the axiom that the earliest records we have of an area’s climate represents that area’s “natural” climate, and therefore any deviation from it (a) is probably man-made; and (b) is definitely bad news.
Except that what you’re describing is not REVERSE discrimination, it’s simply discrimination. Don’t let the retards define the language.
Please, with respect: there is no such thing as reverse discrimination or racism,
It is simply discrimination, racism.
Oops I see I was only repeating what was already (correctly) pointed out.
Which doctors are questioning…… Probably the ones minted in the last few years, who had their residency training hours reduced because it’s “soooo hard”, earn a really nice salary for nicely limited hours and “work-life balance”. The doctors who might be “questioning” are employed by mega-corporations in health and science, places where wokeism flourishes.
Others, took a sacred oath. This one’s my favorite. See anything here that even hints about treating one person before another due to color or any other reason? Nope.
OATH OF MAIMONIDES
Thy eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and death of my
fellow human beings. May the love for my art actuate me at all times; may neither
avarice nor miserliness, nor thirst for glory, or for great reputation engage my mind; for the enemies of truth and philanthropy could easily deceive me and make me forgetful of my lofty aim of doing good to my patients.
May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature of pain. Grant me strength, time, and opportunity, always to correct what I have acquired, always to extend its domain; for knowledge is immense and the spirit of man can extend infinitely to enrich itself daily with new requirements. Today we can discover our errors of yesterday and tomorrow we may obtain a new light on what we think ourselves sure of today.
I have been appointed to watch over the life and death of my fellow human
beings. Here am I ready for my vocation and now I turn unto my calling.
And Jew privilege before that. From N-word to D-word, diversity [dogma] denies women and men’s dignity and agency, and reduces human life to a negotiable property. A wicked solution. A Pro-Choice (“ethical”) religion. One step forward, two steps backward.
Thank you for showing up in order to fight for the Democrats, Chuck Schumer Nancy Pelosi and other pieces of human excrement like you belong together your display of anti-semitism is a massive contribution to the spread of CRT.
While you clearly love CRT with a few details like what races should benefit or be harmed to be ironed out my reaction to that is
The letter F
And then
The letter U
Now go to hell, Jews are not ruining your life you are.
What the fuck are you talking about?
He made the mistake of trying to make sense of one of n.n.’s incomprehensible comments, and got it badly wrong. To make any sense at all of n.n. and the strange language s/he writes in, which bears only a passing resemblance to English, you have to have some idea of his/her basic ideas, the sort of thing s/he is likely to be saying, and then make a guess. I think I understood n.n.’s general point, even if I can’t explain it exactly. Danny misunderstood.
He likely doesn’t know.
And, he did!
So, before it was integration, demands for integration, and that served black interests as they deployed block breakers. That was where one family was moved in, and house prices dropped by half or more. That did not happen because of the color of their skin, it was about conduct. It was also very common for criminals and their families to sue their victims, often winning huge, bankrupting damages.
And that is why SYG usually prohibits civil lawsuits.
Now they demand segregation, and even more perks.
I am completely fed up.
If they leave out the perks, then give them what they want. Segregation. Their own hospitals. Separate entrances and waiting rooms so they feel “safe”. Same thing with neighborhoods and schools.
Give them what they had and said they didn’t want. I’ve reached a point I am becoming a segregationist.
Bears should be segregated according to fur color.
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Actually it usually did happen because of the color of their skin. The block breakers were usually exemplary families, black families with the best credentials and conduct. But people knew what was coming next, and scrambled to get out before it happened, while they could still get something for their houses from some sucker who wasn’t aware of it.
And sometimes that was a self-fulfilling prophecy; the residents fled, prices plummeted, and so poorer and less desirable black people moved in, turned the area into exactly the ****hole the original residents predicted, and pretty soon the original block breakers were looking to move again.
“…less desirable black people…”
Now I’ve heard everything—separating people according to desirable and less desirable.
Rabid diversity including affirmative discrimination. Nice (pun intended).
#HateLovesAbortion
When the first accusations of racial differences in Wuhan coronavirus illnesses came out, San Diego had an ethnic mix of cases that closely corresponded to the general population. Later, when the cases in the factories across the border started coming in, the hispanic group became the majority. This occurred before the vaccines became available and continues to hold true. What happened?
Some of it was transmission to friends and family on this side of the border, but some of it was Wilma Wooten, public health officer for San Diego County. Wilma Wooten denies that there is any treatment for the disease, other than the vaccines.
At some point, well-established Americans in San Diego discovered that there is such a thing as early outpatient treatment for the Wuhan Coronavirus, It could be that all of the other ethnic groups simply started taking care of themselves, or demanding better care from their doctors, while the Hispanics, disproportionately well-established, disproportionately followed the advice of the “doctors” who continue to diagnose patients and then send them home untreated, until they come back to the hospital three weeks later, with shortness of breath.
They did it to my kid, too, but I knew enough to send him and his girlfriend a care package with the over-the-counter version of COVID treatment.
A kid should not have to have a white woman for a mother, in order to be treated properly for this nasty disease.
And in the hospitals in North Texas they have decided to give their ICU beds to those who had vaccines vs non vaccined
Oh, this is just the beginning
Where the F-K is Abbott
Abbott talks the talk like most of the GOP.
Where the F-K is Abbott?
I think he is with Costello.
I was about to type “Hey Abbott!!!”
Obviously, Abbot’s on 1st.
I don’t give a damn is in the Whitehouse.
Texas is a shit storm
Millions of illegals infected with China shit and now thousands of Muslims form Afghanistan, women coming off the planes in full burkas
But don’t treat American citizens
Hey, triage nurse, is the next question, how did you vote in the last election?
Where’s marx311? He’d have a “nuanced” explanation why this isn’t racist that we all could laugh at.
Once and awhile Marxist311 made sense, in that he seemed to understand some technical stuff that others here did not.
Nah, he’d just attempt to cut-and-paste the least deranged material from Vice and Mother Jones.
Maybe his guilty conscience is preventing him from getting a good night’s sleep, like his hero Biden.
I’d sooner trust Granny Clampett’s doctoring than most physicians, especially after the way they’ve fallen in lockstep with the planned-demic narrative.
Their credibility actually started going down years ago when they allowed themselves to be led by the nose by that fraud Ancel Keys.
This may be a natural result of trying to equalize outcomes rather than equalize opportunities.
Excrement like the “doctors” cited here need to have their medical licenses yanked and we need to start writing to our state house members demanding it.
Play offense, you want to end color blindness in medicine? Go work as a garbage man you have no place in medicine.
If we have gotten to point the where we have to prioritize medical care in this country, it means one of two things:
1. Either we need more hospitals and doctors.
2. Or we need to stop letting so damn many illegals come into this country over-filling our hospitals and emergency rooms to the point where it takes medial care away from our citizens and gives it non-citizens who are here illegally.
My primary care doctor is an immigrant. Of course, he came in legally.
We keep being told this, but I recall reading about someone who looked into it and found that it wasn’t true; the reporting was based on an a priori assumption that this must be so, because of systemic racism. And since it must be so, it proves that there is systemic racism. You could substitute “unicorns” and get the same result.
And I recall reading many articles about the number of comorbidities that contribute to Covid complications, such as obesity, hypertension, diabetes, being higher among some ethnic/racial groups than others. Which groups have more with these comorbidities? A quick trip to any grocery store and observation of the contents of shopping buggies and the people pushing them will provide some clues.
What we’re seeing is a demand that those with poor life choices demand rescue from their folly.
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Sometimes it takes hours if it is even possible to retrace things but would you mind linking it here? I believe you but would like some back up if challenged while repeating what you said.
“people of color, with lower life expectancies, are more likely to be downgraded in priority for emergency lifesaving measures”
Interesting theory, got any proof?
An excellent post on a disturbing and evil trend. Thank you, Professor Jacobson, for shining a light on this lunacy.
Editorial comment:
Study author is listed as ” John Murawski “, however, throughout the rest of the article, he is referred to as “Murkowski”.
I had to scroll back and make sure this wasn’t some gimmick by Lisa to try to hold onto her Senate seat!
Another editorial comment:
It is common journalistic practice to just use the last name in a story after the first mention of the whole name, except when the story is about siblings or a husband and wife or others who use the same last name.
Here I go, Noticing Things. By “non-white”, the pushers of this nonsense mean “black”. They are the top-most ethnic group likely to riot, threaten, or bull-whip politicians into submitting to their often-ridiculous demands. Hispanics might be next, but are FAR less likely to do anything like that.
As I noted above: let’s just give the blacks the segregation they are demanding.
“But, TFG! What about all the good blacks who will end up the victim of all of this?” OK.. what about them? Let them, FINALLY, be the ones with “leaders” to step in front of the cameras, and take that metaphorical microphone away from the Sharptons, the Farakhans, the Jackson-Lees.
I was at Jellystone Park last week and Mr Ranger had put up a sign that said “Do not feed the non-white bears”
“Let them, FINALLY, be the them ones with “leaders” to step in front of the cameras, and take that metaphorical microphone away from the Sharptons, the Farakhans, the Jackson-Lees.”
As John Wayne said, “That’ll be the day.”
As Buddy Holly said, “… when I die.”
So blood guilt is now a thing in the United States. We are fast moving back into the dark ages.
Another great piece by the Professor and plenty of good comments already so I will switch topics and send best wishes to Professor Jacobson and his family for this weekend as it looks like Henri is headed straight for the RI coast.
Here is hoping for a sharp right turn out to sea in the next 48 hours!
On Judgement Day, do you think God will care what color your skin is?
Then why should you care what color anyone’s skin is?
I’m not seeing a problem here. You simply set-up “Blacks Only” clinics and staff them with black doctors/nurses for the use of blacks only. You also set up “Whites Only” clinics and staff those clinics with white doctors/nurses for the use of whites only. That way each racial group could receive expert medical care from physicians that are familiar with their particular racial group and therefore the medical “racial gap” would be closed.
Before my wife started cutting my hair for free, I used to prefer black barbers because they were better at cutting my very curly hair since they were used to kinkier hair than mine,
So I vote against segregation of any kind of care.
I say we go a step further and only have drugs and medications derived from the same ethnic group. If your race did not discover the medicine, you don’t get it.
Judging people by the color of their skin is and always will be racist. The Democrats are returning to their racist roots.
Hospital, 2022:
White Guy: “Doc, you’ve got to see my dad. He’s showing all the symptoms of a massive heart attack!”
Woke Doctor: “Sorry, but we give priority care to BIPOC individuals.”
White Guy: (*Pulls out a pistol and sticks it between the doctor’s eyes*). Well, Doc, does THIS bump us up the priority list now?”
I’m a mostly retired physician coming up on six decades of having served patients from all walks of life. I taught at five medical schools in the State of Texas and I come from old-fashioned training that eschewed peripheral nonsense like CRT. Life is sacred, and when I took my Hippocratic Oath—it became part of my DNA. I come from Latino heritage, but always an American and Texan first.
I am just so disgusted by this form of Marxism. I still treat my family for emergencies, but I don’t have an active practice. If I did, I would throw those quacks on into the street head-first if they suggested that I tell me not to treat patients the same.
It goes against everything that I believe in, ethically and professionally. It also goes against my religious beliefs—and none of that will ever, ever change.
Diversity of individuals, minority of one. A religion (i.e. behavioral protocol) given by God or man that acknowledges individual dignity, intrinsic value, and inordinate worth. A medical profession that subscribes to an ethical code (morality’s relativistic or circumstantial sibling) that pledges to do no harm by choice or premeditation.
Keep it up Lefties, we will soon have a race war that you are trying to create.