RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s a new front in the woke campaign to control our national institutions: health care. Largely out of sight of the American people, the federal government is pushing to fundamentally corrupt the principles and practice of medicine. Physicians and patients alike are set to suffer from woke health care. In many cases, they already are.

Every American needs to know what Washington is doing. It’s using taxpayer money and unaccountable regulation to embed “critical race theory” and “anti-racism” into every level of health care. The secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, recently made this clear when he declared that “health equity pervades everything” his department does. In making this declaration, he was following the lead of the president he serves. It sounds nice. But ensuring health equity requires taking a divisive and discriminatory approach to treating patients and providing care.

Which is exactly what’s happening. Since the start of this year, Washington has effectively bribed physicians to embrace discrimination on a day-to-day basis by offering higher Medicare- reimbursement rates to physicians who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” That’s code for recasting everything that happens at the doctor’s office in light of race, including patients’ access to care and specific treatments. Ninety-three percent of primary-care physicians accept Medicare.

And with many medical providers still dealing with Covid-induced financial struggles, they’ll probably find it hard to turn down the extra money.

Yet what’s good for physicians’ bottom lines is bad for their profession and for patient health. The goal of anti-racism is to force physicians to make medical decisions based in part, if not entirely, on a patient’s skin color. That’s neither what physicians signed up to do nor what patients expect when they go to the doctor. To see what this looks like in practice, consider the anti-racist pandemic policies that New York recently adopted. The Empire State sought to dole out scarce — and potentially life-saving — COVID treatments on a racially preferential basis.

It’s telling that the Biden administration refused to directly mandate such discriminatory care, though key White House advisers have praised similar policies in the past. Instead, it’s dragooning physicians into doing the dirty work themselves. This underhanded approach to imposing wokeness on health care carries through to the president’s most recent budget, which quietly proposes a variety of health initiatives grounded in critical race theory and anti-racism.

To start, the White House wants to fund “implicit bias training for health-care providers.” Such training, which has been widely condemned and discredited, tells physicians they are inherently biased and pushes them to factor in race when making care decisions. The administration also wants to invest tens of millions of dollars in identifying “barriers to equity” in Medicare and Medicaid, while throwing more than $350 million at research focused on “health disparities and inequities.” This research will lay the groundwork for a new round of federal regulations codifying critical race theory and anti-racism into the heart of health care.

The White House is now working with Congress to pass this funding into law. Though presidential budgets are often largely aspirational messaging documents, there’s ample reason to believe that the Biden administration takes these dangerous ideas seriously and wants them implemented in law. As these policies are enacted, they will move health care further away from its principled foundation of individualized care and equal access for all.

There’s a reason such policies are being pushed outside the public eye. The Biden administration seems to fear the broad public blowback to such ideology in education, so it’s moving forward in a way that keeps people from noticing. Yet the subterfuge cannot be allowed to continue. Woke health care is an assault on the physicians who want to improve lives and a potentially mortal threat to patient well-being. The sooner Americans recognize that Washington is introducing the disease of ideology into health care, the sooner we can cure it.