Under Joe Biden, no aspect of our lives is safe from the long reach of federal bureaucrats who are more interested in imposing their own values on Missourians than they are in improving our lives and livelihoods. If there’s one area that should be free from politics, it’s the care we receive from our physicians. The highest priority for every physician should be providing high-quality care to every patient. Politics should be the furthest thing from a physician’s mind. But now under a new rule put forward by this administration, politics – and not the care being provided – is the highest priority at the doctor’s office.
Under this new rule, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services included a new quality metric that affects how physicians are paid, and it effectively requires doctors to craft so-called “anti-racism plans” in their practice. Medicare will pay physicians who adopt an anti-racism plan more than they will pay physicians who provide quality care. Most concerningly, these anti-racism plans must define race as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one.” This is the same strategy used by proponents of Critical Race Theory to indoctrinate our kids in liberal ideology while they’re supposed to be learning in school.
The radical changes the administration is making are not just political and inappropriate – they also completely ignore medical science and standards of care. It is a medical fact that genetic predispositions exist among individuals of different races. For example, cystic fibrosis is significantly more common in white Americans than in other groups, whereas genetic mutations that can cause breast cancer are more common in Jewish women of Eastern European descent than in other groups. Black Americans are 24 times more likely to be born with sickle cell anemia than white Americans. Diseases like these are why it is critical for doctors to ask biographical questions regarding a patient’s race.
This past February, I led several of my Republican colleagues on the Ways and Means Committee in writing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to express our concern over this disturbing rule change and to urge the Biden administration to withdraw this misguided rule. The response we received from Biden’s HHS was silence.