If you follow this blog regularly, you know I’ve written several times about woke ideology infecting medical schools. (Woke Medical Education Update 2024) Today, we have good news – some in Congress are pushing back.

Greg Murphy and Stanley Goldfarb, both physicians, have come together to change the direction of this dangerous movement. Dr. Murphy is a practicing urologist and a North Carolina Congressman. Dr. Goldfarb is a nephrologist and chairman of Do No Harm. They write in The Wall Street Journal: “The ideology of “diversity, equity and inclusion” is dangerous everywhere, but especially in medical education. Its influence has become entrenched nationwide. Accrediting institutions are pushing all of America’s 158 accredited medical schools to train future physicians in political activism, wasting precious time and resources that could be spent on rigorous coursework and preparation for medical practice. The result will likely be future physicians less qualified to meet patients’ needs.”

They say to restore medical education to its life-saving mission, Congress should ensure that taxpayer dollars don’t fund its decline. One of them, Rep. Murphy, will introduce the Educate Act on Tuesday. It would eliminate all federal funding, including student loans, for medical schools that engage in the worst DEI practices. Schools would have to agree to the following:

• No racist teaching. Medical schools teach about “intersectionality,” “colonization” and “white supremacy” while promoting the idea that people are either “oppressors” or “oppressed.” These concepts push medical students to treat patients differently based on race, sex or “gender identity.” In 2021 two physicians proposed giving preferential treatment to “Black and Latinx heart failure patients” at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. 

• No racial discrimination. Medical schools increasingly offer scholarships, classes and programming designed for—and sometimes available only to—students of specific races. This includes “affinity groups” students can join voluntarily, as well as classes that segregate students for the sake of learning. 

• No loyalty oaths. Medical schools routinely require applicants and faculty to write DEI statements as a condition of acceptance or employment. Such requirements violate freedom of speech and eviscerate merit. Schools reject candidates for not being “progressive” enough while choosing others for their devotion to DEI. 

• No DEI offices. Most medical schools have a department, team or office dedicated to DEI. These bureaucracies exist to spread a divisive ideology across campus, from the curriculum to extracurricular activities. 

They continue, “In addition to denying federal money to schools that engage in these practices, the Educate Act would prevent accrediting organizations, such as the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and the Association of American Medical Colleges, from requiring DEI education at medical schools.”

“Lawmakers and the public should recognize DEI for what it is: a dangerous and contagious philosophy. Until Congress takes action, this ideology will continue to corrupt the institutions that train physicians. Medicine and the people it’s meant to serve will suffer.”

Let’s be honest – no one cares about the color of the doctor’s skin! They only want to be sure he or she is well-trained and knowledgeable about their condition. If we lower the bar for minorities to get into medical school, what we’re really doing is denigrating the credentials of thousands of well-trained and talented minority physicians who got into medical school on the merits of their ability! Lowering the bar hurts them and their patients. It’s just not acceptable.

 

Regular readers of this blog know I sometime stray from the topic of healthcare to passionate issues of mine. One of those is school choice. School choice represents the solution to the problem of poor education, especially in low-income families who can’t afford better. School choice is the path to upward mobility for these children who need a good education to get ahead in this world.

We tend to think of this problem as an inner-city phenomenon, where poor public city schools trap low-income minority children in a never-ending spiral that keeps them impoverished – and that’s certainly often the case. But this problem also is experienced in rural America, where good public schools are often rare, too.

Republicans are correctly associated with favoring school choice in most states, while Democrats usually oppose school choice in deference to their teachers unions supporters. But in rural America, even the Republicans have often opposed school choice, encouraged by teachers unions. But now that pattern may be changing.

Corey DeAngelis, writing for The Wall Street Journal, tells us the Wyoming Senate passed a broad school-choice bill Thursday by a vote of 28-3. The bill would establish Wyoming’s first education savings account program, allowing families with preschool- to high-school-age children earning up to five times the federal poverty level—$156,000 for a family of four—to take their children’s state-funded education dollars to the public, private, charter or home-based providers of their choosing. The grant would start at $6,000 for children in the lowest income category and decline with rising family income. The bill has already passed in the House, so it now heads to Governor Mark Gordon for his signature.

This breaks the trend for Republicans to oppose school choice, backed by the teachers unions. They say their constituents don’t want it because there aren’t many private schools in their districts.

Yet the nine most rural states in the country (as measured by population share) now have some form of private school choice. Maine and Vermont have the oldest private-school voucher programs in the U.S., both enacted in the late 19th century for students who live in rural districts without public schools. Both programs allow state funding to follow the child to the public or private school his family chooses.

In 2021 West Virginia became the first state to make school choice available to all families, regardless of income. And in Alabama last Thursday, Gov. Kay Ivey signed a universal school choice bill into law. That is notable because the state teachers union, the Alabama Education Association, has contributed more than $3 million to Republican legislative campaigns since 2018. A report by the Alabama Policy Institute last year found the union “was the single largest contributor to Republicans in the last election cycle.”

Mr. DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. He says, “In Texas my organization’s super PAC, the American Federation for Children Victory Fund, targeted 13 antichoice Republican incumbents for defeat in last week’s primaries. Ten either lost outright or were forced into runoffs. Rural Republican resistance to school choice is crumbling. Now if only Democrats would get on board.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called it “the civil-rights movement of our times.” School choice is the freight train coming that can’t be stopped. It’s time for all Americans to “get on board!” The education of our future generation is at stake.

Socialized medicine has been the goal of Progressives for over 100 years. Yes, since the days of President Teddy Roosevelt, the first Progressive president, there has been a move to socialize all medical care. That means government control of healthcare.

ObamaCare was passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote, but it represented a major step forward in this process of socializing medicine. At the time, Vice President Joe Biden was caught on a hot mike telling President Barack Obama “This is a big f______ing deal!”  Yes, Joe, it is.

Recognizing it was politically impossible to come right out and say they wanted socialized medicine, the Obama Administration pushed through the Affordable Care Act with a provision that forced all states to accept expansion of Medicaid to previously ineligible Americans. However, the Supreme Court struck down this provision of the bill and left it up to the states to decide if they wanted to expand their Medicaid.

The expansion of Medicaid in the ACA (ObamaCare) called for no cost to the states for three years, but thereafter they would have to pick up the tab. This bargain with the devil has had severe consequences for many states who accepted the deal.

The AP says that California expected 800,000 new enrollees after the state’s 2013 Medicaid expansion. The real number was 2.3 million. In New Mexico, new enrollment exceeded estimates by 44%. In Oregon actual enrollment exceeded expectations by 73% and in the state of Washington by more than 100%. Needless to say this has crushed the budgets of these states. Illinois once projected that its Medicaid expansion would cost the state $573 million for 2017 through 2020. But enrollment has exceeded expectations by 200,000, leading to a new price tag of about $2 billion, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Alas, many more states have given in to pressure to accept the Medicaid expansion and now we are learning of other severe consequences. In addition to blowing up the budget of many states, many hospitals are closing their doors.

Hayden Dublois and Michael Greibrok, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says there are only 10 states left that have resisted the Medicaid expansion. They are the lucky ones!

They reported their new research which looked at 4,000 hospitals nationwide, examining their federal filings to see how they fared financially. In 2013, the final year before ObamaCare’s implementation, hospitals in expansion states reported just over $10 billion in losses due to Medicaid. The most recent data, from 2021, show the shortfalls ballooning more than 115%, to $22.3 billion. By comparison, the shortfalls in states that didn’t expand Medicaid grew by only 6%. When the data from 2022 and 2023 become available, they’ll likely show even bigger losses in expansion states.

Such massive red ink is written into Medicaid’s flawed design. The program reimburses hospitals a mere 78% of what Medicare pays for the same treatments and procedures, and 62% of what private health insurance pays. Expansion pushes far more people off private insurance and onto Medicaid, meaning hospitals make less on the same patients they may have seen before. And they’re seeing far more Medicaid patients than expected. As of last year, nearly 20 million people received Medicaid through expansion nationwide, compared to initial state estimates of less than seven million. All of them are able-bodied adults. Total Medicaid enrollment is more than 90 million.

Hospitals must cover the shortfalls somehow, but they have no good options. They can lobby state lawmakers for more taxpayer funding, which is a challenge in an era of tight budgets. More likely, they’re raising the costs they charge to private health insurance companies. In other words, they’re forcing some patients to pay more because Medicaid expansion recipients pay less. That necessarily drives up the cost of health insurance, which rose 4% between 2022 and 2023 and another 4% heading into 2024.

The soaring costs persist because Medicaid expansion continually shrinks the number of people on private health insurance. Every year, there are fewer people to stick with higher prices and more people paying less than the cost of the care they receive. There’s a name for that: A death spiral, and it’s already killing hospitals nationwide.

In the South, Arkansas’s Crittenden Regional Hospital had a nearly $7 million surplus before Medicaid expansion. It closed in 2014 after profits turned to losses. In the Midwest, Illinois’s Westlake Hospital managed a surplus before expansion, but by 2019, a nearly $7 million loss pushed it out of business. Rural hospitals appear to be hit the hardest. At least 12 have closed in expansion states despite promises from activists and experts that expansion would not only save rural hospitals but also add hospital jobs.

The facts haven’t stopped ObamaCare’s advocates from demanding that the 10 holdout states embrace this foolishness. The way they tell it, these states are heartless, leaving needy people out in the cold. Yet Medicaid expansion hurts the needy, since it forces some of the most vulnerable patients to compete with able-bodied adults for the same care, making wait times and health outcomes worse.

In summary, Medicaid expansion is bankrupting states and hospitals. Many hospitals are closing their doors because they can’t keep up with the red ink and they can’t pass the losses along to their private patients. The net result; less state money for education and other priorities, fewer hospitals to care for the needy -especially in rural areas, poorer care for more patients, and higher private healthcare insurance policies. It’s clear that 10 years after ObamaCare we’re still seeing the negative impact of this disastrous legislation.