The Systemic Illness in Healthcare
America's Health is at Risk
I am worried about our health. Not just the health of our exceptional country, but for the health of her citizens. I graduated from medical school 14 years ago and then went through 3 years of family medicine residency followed by 1 year of fellowship. When I completed my training, I was hired on as teaching faculty at a family medicine residency program. What I have seen happening in medicine since residency has been extremely disturbing.
I am not naïve. I know that the forces of leftism have been present in medicine for a long time. The dictator of Syria is a physician. The mass murderer revolutionary of Cuba, Che Guevara, was a physician. Josef Mengele, was a physician. So no, doctors are not immune from revolutionary, fascist, and mass murdering tendencies. But now, those tendencies are becoming more and more prominent in American healthcare.
It's hard to pick a starting point, but let me just highlight several of the things I have witnessed since graduating medical school:
The Radicalization of the American Medical Association
The AMA used to be opposed to single payer (government-run healthcare) when they opposed Medicare. Now, they openly advocate for more and more government overreach in medicine. Their student section, the AMSA, formally endorses it. But that’s not the worse yet. They recently sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking that they go after and prosecute anybody who opposes sex-denying care (aka “gender-affirming” care) of minors.
The Radicalization of State Governments
The state of California just passed a bill that allows children to travel across state lines, WITHOUT THEIR PARENTS, to receive transgender puberty blockers, chemical and surgical castration, and female sterilization and mastectomies. Under the law, the state of California assumes temporary guardianship until the child leaves the state. This is quite literally the definition of kidnapping and sexual mutilation.
Though proven to provide less accessible, more expensive, care, the promise of utopian single-payer healthcare still lures people on the left to this day. In 2011, Vermont became the only state to pass a single-payer system. Then, in 2014, they totally scrapped it and gave up. Why? Reality hit with a price-tag that would have bankrupted the state. That didn’t stop California from trying the same, but ultimately a project cost of twice the state’s budget put it to rest.
They won’t be the last states that attempt to bring government-run healthcare to the masses.
Medical School Admissions Based on Race and Political Leanings
Medical schools are now offering, and conducting, interviews that push a left-wing admission bias. Their “holistic review” model takes into account social justice advocacy, political events, and religion into their admission rubric. The goal? To infuse only left-wing conforming students so that healthcare will eventually have no conservatives, and thus offer no opposition to single-payer, abortion, sex-denying care, or racial discrimination in healthcare.
https://www.aamc.org/services/member-capacity-building/holistic-review
https://medschool.vcu.edu/media/medschool/images/new-admissions-site/holistic-review-model.png
Implicit Bias and Diversity Training
Are you a racist, sexist, or homophobe? Do you carry out your prejudice on your patients? Well, you do, you just don’t know it. That’s the crux of implicit bias training. Many hospitals, state medical boards, and residencies require their doctors to undergo this training. It came as a surprise to one of my former colleagues, a gay man, that he was biased against gay people and had to undergo “retraining” at the Ohio State Medical center. Implicit bias is all the rage these days, but there is little evidence to support its use:
Of course, diversity workforce training has become so common place these days, that very few people have not had to experience it. There’s just one problem….as the author of this study found, “Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.”
https://hbr.org/2012/03/diversity-training-doesnt-work
Lies About When Life Begins
We are constantly told that climate change is a FACT, because 97% of scientists agree. But yet, when 96% of biologists agree that life begins at conception, they choose to deny it. Georgia “governor” and “election denier” Stacey Abrams, has recently said that ultrasounds used to detect fetal heartbeats give off a “fake” sound used by white males in the pro-life movement to discourage abortion. As somebody who helps deliver prenatal care, and has personally operated fetal dopplers, those heartbeats at 6 weeks of gestation are very much real. But that doesn’t stop her and the media from lying about basic biology.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3211703
https://nypost.com/2022/09/22/stacey-abrams-claims-6-week-fetal-heartbeat-is-sound/
The Politicization of Medical Science and Journals
Several years ago, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ran an article explaining that the Affordable Care Act was working so wonderfully, getting people access to care, and saving the country money. The author? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. As in, the architect of the Affordable Care Act. As in, the brother of Obama Chief of Staff and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. As in, the guy who said nobody should live past age 72, nor should we spend resources on them. In the medical world, we call that a “conflict of interest.” But that didn’t stop this joke of a journal from publishing it. Oh, and does anybody remember “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor?”
The dirty little secret of the medical world is that these highly touted journals are no harbingers of free thought and investigative medical science. They suffer from what is called “publication bias.” That is, they only publish results with which they agree. If those results are then found to be false, they issue small, un-publicized retractions, and move on. This also occurs in academia. Only professors who publish positive results on left-wing theories get tenure. Guess what happens to professors who publish results that don’t favor those ideologies? You guessed it. How do we know that left-wing publication bias exists? Because these professors faked studies and got them published:
https://reason.com/2018/10/03/dog-rape-hoax-papers-pluckrose-lindsay/
The left also tout abortion as extraordinarily safe, and safer than childbirth. This is an outright lie. Potential side effects from abortion include: post-traumatic stress disorder, heavy and excessive bleeding (including death), increased risk for Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, depression, fertility issues and scarring, life threatening blood-borne infections (sepsis). They always mention the cases of rape and incest. While my heart feels for these women (my mother was the product of a rape), they use these cases to justify any and all abortions. Rape and incest account for just 0.15% of all abortions, but are used to justify ALL abortions, even up to birth. The Democratic Party platform currently allows for abortions up to the POINT OF BIRTH. Yes, just 5 seconds before a baby exits the vaginal canal, the official Democratic Party Platform allows for that child to be killed.
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/
https://www.liveaction.org/news/three-myths-third-trimester-abortions/
Critical Race Theory in Medicine
The scourge of racial Marxism is real. This I have seen first-hand. Medical school classes now include lectures on white privilege, climate change, and social justice. At my employer, several faculty members brought in CRT professors to say such things as “pulmonary function tests are racist” and “Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder.” Another lecturer told our residents that white doctors actively discriminate against patients based on their race. During the George Floyd riots, the nationwide fad of “White Coats for Black Lives” took place, where doctors took a knee outside of their hospitals protesting what they perceive as racism in medicine. Could they prove their claim? No, of course not. But they never let facts get in the way of their narrative. Training the next generation of left-wing ideologues appears to be taking hold, as medical students are now pushing for all medical schools to include CRT in their training
Most academic and medical centers now have a “Chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” official that sits in the C-suites. Their sole job is to find ways their company is racist (whether they find any or not is another story) and then push CRT.
https://www.upmchealthplan.com/employers/blog/innovation/embracing-diversity/default.aspx
More disturbingly, academia is actively calling for racial discrimination IN FAVOR of racial minorities. Not only is this happening in medical school and training, it actually occurred at the state level during the COVID pandemic. Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf instituted a formula for the distribution of the COVID antibody treatments. In this formula, your ZIP CODE was a key factor. Yes, if you lived in an area with a higher minority population, your ability to get the COVID antibody infusion was higher. We used to call this racism. Now we call this equity and social justice.
The sole accrediting body for residency programs has also gotten in on the action. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has now taken it upon itself to redefine what a family physician is. Under their new definition, they state, “Family physicians advocate for social justice and ethical principles to remove barriers to equitable care for all populations.” Theoretically, they can now force residency program to teach social justice or take away their accreditation status. Since the American Board of Family Medicine only allows doctors to be certified if they graduate from an accredited residency, they can literally keep doctors from being board certified unless they are taught social justice and other left-wing ideology.
https://www.acgme.org/globalassets/pfassets/programrequirements/120_familymedicine_2023.pdf
The Trend to Mediocrity in Medicine
Living in the rust belt, we are no stranger to engineering and structural failures in infrastructure. As you walk across our bridges, do you ever wonder “I sure hope this bridge was designed by a racial or sexual minority.” No, of course not. You hope the bridge was designed by any person who had the smarts and competency to design a structural sound bridge. That’s not what is happening in medicine right now.
Your very own life is being put on the line under the guise of “equity.” NYU just recently fired a professor because his Organic Chemistry class (a prerequisite for medical school) was too hard. Step 1 of the United States Medical Licensing Examination has gone to “pass/fail.” Now, residencies can’t differentiate their applicants based on scores. And in the most befuddling move of all, many of the institutions that govern residency programs are asking that interviews be conducted VIRTUALLY only. Yes, they are saying that interviews should be done over the computer so that people who can afford to travel for interviews aren’t favored, over students who cannot. These same institutions are also saying that in-person interviews give people an unfair advantage over others. Isn’t that the point? Would you ever hire somebody without seeing how they handle themselves around others, with patients, or even if they dress professionally? If you’re a job-seeker, would you accept a position without seeing the work environment or meeting your potential bosses? All of this is being done in the name, of you guessed it, equity.
https://reason.com/2022/10/03/maitland-jones-jr-organic-chemistry-nyu-fired/
https://www.usmle.org/usmle-step-1-transition-passfail-only-score-reporting
Unelected Boards Limiting Our Ability to Practice
While obtaining a state medical license does not require board certification, most hospitals and insurances require that physicians obtain board certification. In Family Medicine, the largest board certification is the ABFM, the American Board of Family Medicine. One of the requirements to sit for the ABFM board exam is to graduate from an ACGME-accredited residency program. Which, of course, means that your residency must conform to standards of the ACGME bureaucracy. As mentioned previously, this now includes social justice training.
So, in summary: if you want to practice medicine at most hospitals, you must be trained in left-wing social justice. A simple cure would be for states to mandate that hospitals accept alternate board certifications, or none at all. There is mixed-evidence regarding quality of patient outcomes and board certification, with some studies showing NO correlation. Who are the biggest proponents of requiring board certification? Why, the boards themselves, of course, which rake in millions of dollars each year in required physician fees. For more, check out Dr. Wes Fisher’s blog post:
https://drwes.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-canary-in-american-board-of-family.html
FINAL THOUGHTS
I could go on and on about the leftist infusion in medicine. There is quite literally a residency in New York City completely based on social justice. Social justice is the very antithesis of actual justice. Whereas justice requires equality under the law, social justice requires preferential treatment in favor of a desired outcome. And under the current state of American healthcare academia, there too is a desired outcome. Medical academics think that differences in health outcomes indicate racial bias as the sole culprit. They don’t take into account things like smoking rates, pregnancy rates, sexually transmitted infection, drug use, diet, and other factors that vary between populations. In fact, they claim that even these discrepancies are due to racism. Radical leftism and its intellectual laziness have infected and killed everything it has touched. And it’s doing the same thing in medicine. As a physician, I worry about my patients’ health. But now, I have to worry about the health of our nation because of a misguided, politically radical group of healthcare professionals.
How can you cure America of this radical agenda in healthcare? Divorce yourself from the precepts of the radical left. Choose a health-share plan. Interview your doctor to see if they adhere to leftist principles, such as sex-denying care. Choose a health system who doesn’t use your money to fund radical groups or politicians. Choose a doctor who works for YOU, not the health system, such as a direct primary care practice. Choose a doctor who doesn’t ask for the pronouns of your 2-year-old child. Only then, with relentless pursuit, can we fix healthcare in our country.
Thank you for sharing truth!