By Andrea Widburg
Those who came of age in the second half of the 20th century or later, have been blessed to witness a time of extraordinary medical progress. Now, though, thanks to academia’s mindless push for diversity, we are almost certainly on the precipice of a steep decline in the quality of medical care in America.
Beginning in the late 19th century, modern medicine brought us anesthetics and sophisticated germ theory that allowed safe surgeries, antibiotics, the understanding and treatment of chronic diseases, organ transplants, dramatically decreased maternal and child mortality, unimaginably successful treatments for cancer, vision-correcting surgery, and so much more. In the first world, the human life span roughly doubled compared to the lifespan people could expect just 150 years ago. It truly was a time of wonders and miracles.
As medicine grew more sophisticated, doctors’ standing in society increased. Medicine ceased to be an apprentice-type trade and became a high-cachet profession, with gratifying financial awards. By the middle of the 20th century and for several decades thereafter, medical schools were able to limit themselves to the best of the best from every college class. Sure, there were bad doctors, but even if they were bad, they were still smart. (Small consolation, of course, when you’re on the receiving end of malpractice.)
We conservatives knew that socialized medicine threatened all of this and we fought against it for decades. The moment the government takes over medicine, killing the profit motive, it begins rationing care. People have access to doctors; they just don’t have access to treatments that save or improve their lives.
In Canada, the government is putting huge pressure on citizens to kill themselves. In England, the infamous Liverpool Care Pathway didn’t bother to seek volunteers. Instead, the hospitals stopped treating elderly patients who no longer contributed labor to the system and were now dead weight. As Cuba and Venezuela show, eventually, the only ones who receive care are those connected to the government; everyone else gets only the illusion of care.
Another concern about socialized medicine is a decline in the quality of medical practitioners. That’s because the profits available from spending four years in college, four years in medical school, and between three to ten years in post-medical school training are gone. With profits diminishing, the best and the brightest turn their attention elsewhere. So far, though, and despite Obamacare, young doctors who don’t take on too much debt can still earn a good living, so we conservatives thought we’d dodged the socialized medicine bullet.
What we never expected, was to see medical schools, once so proud of their reputations, voluntarily degrade the quality of the students they accepted, trained, and graduated. And yet that’s precisely what’s happening now, thanks to the gods of diversity, which insist that skin color, sex, and “gender identity” are the most important metric in judging a person’s qualifications for a place in a college or for a job.
According to a proud report from the Association of American Medical Colleges, which works with the American Medical Association to accredit medical schools, nearly two-thirds of American medical schools have made “diversity, equity, and inclusion” a preeminent part of their mission and curriculum:
Forty-four percent of medical schools have tenure and promotion policies that reward scholarship on “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Seventy percent make students take a course on “diversity, inclusion, or cultural competence.” And 79 percent require that all hiring committees receive “unconscious bias” training or include “equity advisors”—people whose job it is to ensure diversity among the faculty.
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At many medical schools, concerns about social justice have saturated every layer of institutional decision-making, particularly the hiring and admissions process, a trend some doctors say will undermine meritocracy and endanger patients.
The report indicates that more than a third of medical schools offer extra funding to departments that hit diversity targets, half require job applicants to submit diversity statements, and over two thirds “require departments/units to assemble a diverse pool of candidates for faculty positions.”
In addition, every school reported using a “holistic admissions” process—a euphemism for affirmative action—that assessed applicants’ grades and test scores in light of their race, lowering the academic bar for groups “underrepresented in medicine.”
What all this means, according to the same Washington Free Beacon article linked above, is that quality education is declining:
[M]edical schools have lowered standards for all students, even the top-performers, to avert a scenario in which dropout rates explode. “Once you take in a cohort of students who struggle, you have to ratchet down the entire curriculum,” said Stanley Goldfarb, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Medical School, a Washington Free Beacon enthusiast, and the father of Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb. “So everyone gets through with much less rigorous courses.”
Everything the left touches it destroys and, when leftism destroys medical schools, we will all suffer.