Team Biden’s racial discrimination in health care reminds me of South Africa’s arpatheid I grew up underBy Benita Cotton-Orr
June 29, 2022
Have you ever seen racial discrimination and segregation in health care? I have. And I worry it’s coming to America.
I grew up in apartheid South Africa, where the color of your skin determined everything. Being “colored” — of mixed racial heritage — I was treated as a second-class citizen. And the medical services people like me had access to were third-rate, at best.
The crowded hospitals black and brown people could go to had much longer wait times than whites-only hospitals. The physicians and other medical professionals we could see were trained separately from their white counterparts and not allowed to attend to white patients. Medications and treatments were generally less available because of our skin color.
Add it all up, and racial discrimination limited our chances to lead the healthiest, happiest life.
I left South Africa in 1986 for America. I came here because my children could have the opportunities I never did — including the chance to see the best doctors, go to the best hospitals and get the highest-quality care.
And now the discrimination I left behind is threatening American health care, just from a different direction.The federal government, under the Biden administration, has wholly bought into the claim that health care suffers from “systemic racism.” So it’s pursuing a strategy to embed “anti-racism” into medical principles and practice. While that language may sound positive, it’s simply another name for racial discrimination. No less than anti-racism’s founder, Ibram X. Kendi, has made that clear by saying, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination; the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Sure enough, the federal government is sowing the seeds of medical discrimination. Since the year’s start, it has paid a “bonus” to physicians who accept Medicare to “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” This is effectively a mandate on all of health care since more than 90% of primary-care physicians are covered and the extra pay is almost impossible to turn down. As physicians try to abide by this policy, they will find it harder and harder to provide equal access to care.
* * *
Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/06/29/bidens-racial-discrimination-in-health-care-recalls-south-africa-apartheid-i-grew-up-under/
