In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) planned to roll out a ranking system regarding who should receive any approved vaccines first. At the top of the list were medical and national security officials, then those considered to be essential workers, followed by those deemed high-risk, such as the elderly and people with underlying health conditions. What was also floated for about a second was putting blacks and Hispanics, who were reported to be disproportionally affected by COVID, at the head of the line for — of course — “equity!” However, the appearance of favoring one ethnic group of people over others didn’t seem to be a wise choice for medical officials. Well, fast forward four years. If giving people a vaccine based on race seems a bit ghoulish, the Biden administration may be upping the ante.
In the Biden administration’s never-ending quest for “equity,” the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is proposing equity requirements on hospitals that perform kidney transplants. The reason: to address supposed “racial bias” regarding wait times and the “profiteering and inequity” of those hospitals. In a press release, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra stated the proposal would “incentivize” hospitals via a point system to prioritize “low-income” patients and create health equity:
The organ transplant industry, like every other part of society, is not immune to racial inequities. Black Americans disproportionately struggle with life-threatening kidney disease, yet they receive a smaller percentage of kidney transplants. The Biden-Harris Administration is taking concrete steps to remove racial bias when calculating wait times and rooting out profiteering and inequity in the transplant process.
So, just how would the point system that the race-obsessed Biden administration has come up with to determine who wins the transplant lottery and who doesn’t actually work? Hospitals would receive an annual score based on the number of transplants, acceptance rates, and post-transplant success. There is a possible total of 100 points, of which 60 are based on the number of transplants performed compared to a, you guessed it, government target, which of course, puts more weight on “low-income” patients. This portion of the proposal reads in part:
“Each kidney transplant that is furnished to a patient who meets the low-income definition would be multiplied by 1.2, thus counting that transplant as 1.2 instead of 1. The resulting count of the overall number of kidney transplants performed during the PY [performance year], after the health equity performance adjustment is applied, would then be compared to the transplant target.”
Participating hospitals can also get “extra credit” for their equity scores. One requirement would be to come up with a “health equity” plan to identify “gaps in access among populations in their communities.” That plan could include the education of donors from “underserved” communities, transportation for patients on waitlists, and even looking at issues like food insecurity and out-of-pocket prescription drug costs. Because hospitals that are still understaffed after COVID have all kinds of personnel and resources for things like food insecurity.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is the former associate dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, founder of “Do No Harm,” an anti-woke medical group, and a kidney specialist himself. He made the dismal but predictable result of such a program. He brought up some very possible legal issues with such a plan that the Biden administration is trying to get around, and he added,
“They probably don’t want to say ‘we’re doing this for black patients,’ because they know they’re going to get into trouble with it. So these are ways around it to do what they’re trying to accomplish…I think what they’ve just decided is, ‘We’ll just give an incentive to the hospitals to do this and let them figure out how to do this.’ But I don’t know that there’s a real system in place to allow that. So either you’re going to have a system that ends up being purely on the basis of race, or it’s going to be a system that fails totally.”
Here is where we are at. The federal government wants to determine, essentially, who lives and who dies from kidney disease based on a diabolical racial score that will somehow achieve that elusive “equity” the left so desires. The scariest part, is if they can score a health condition, what else can they score?