The Patriot Post® · Biden's HHS Turns Docs Into Propagandists

In what can be interpreted only as an explicitly political charade, the Biden administration via the Department of Health and Human Services is offering Medicare doctors a bonus to “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” In other words, the Biden administration aims to recruit doctors to push leftist social justice propaganda.

The new HHS rule, effective January 1, says that Medicare doctors can boost their reimbursement rates by conducting a review of their practice and its “commitment to anti-racism.” Of course, anti-racism is simply code for Critical Race Theory’s Marxist “equity” ethic of equal outcome. Equal access has been the ideological standard that perfectly agrees with the Hippocratic Oath. That has been erased in favor of an equality-of-outcomes paradigm that ignores or dismisses the needs of the individual in favor of collective identity concerns.

When looking further into the new HHS rule, it quickly becomes apparent that this “anti-racism” push is indeed all predicated upon the flawed CRT ideology. For example, HHS redefines race as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one.” Therefore, any disparities in medically related outcomes are not to be tied to biological differences but to sociological causes. As the new rule asserts, “It is important to acknowledge systemic racism as a root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially-defined racial groups.”

This new rule is tied to an executive order Joe Biden signed early in his presidency in which he ordered a “whole-of-government equity agenda,” including the “equitable delivery of government benefits.”

The Washington Free Beacon reports: “The new rules update Medicare’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, a scoring rubric that determines eligible doctors’ reimbursement rates. Congress set up that system in 2015 to reward clinicians for high-quality, cost-effective medical care — and to penalize them for providing unnecessary, costly services.”

Medicare’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, which received broad bipartisan support when it was created by Congress, was never intended to be used as an explicitly political tool. Yet that’s exactly what the Biden administration is doing. “Republicans who voted for [the scoring system] weren’t voting for this,” contends Manhattan Institute scholar Chris Pope, who helped develop the 2015 incentive system. “The idea that this would be used as a tool of racial policy never came up.”

Authoritarians will use any apparatus of government available to force their ideological agenda onto the populace. But the doctor ought to order something different here: Constitutionally limited government, not unlimited and power-grabbing bureaucracy, is actually the correct prescription for America.