And the bill would fund programs
"to increase diversity of health professionals." Frist tells us,
"These programs are critical to help health professions institutions increase the number of underrepresented minority students and faculty to achieve a culturally competent workforce."
But what about
"a medically competent workforce?" I almost died in my thirties because when I asked my doctor look at a big lump in my armpit that had been there for a couple of months, he said,
"It doesn't feel like a tumor. It's probably just a muscle pull." ...
What
"increasing diversity" means in the real world is that more competent
white and Asian applicants to medical school are rejected in favor of less competent black and
Hispanic ones. Why does Bill Frist want to inflict less competent doctors on America? Ask him. I'd love to find out.
It's not as if
African-American youths have never had anyone tell them to become a doctor. How many times have you seen a black kid in the ghetto being interviewed on TV and he says,
"I want to be a doctor or a lawyer when I grow up." ...
Medical school affirmative action is frequently
justified on the grounds that doctors who got in on a racial quota are more likely to wind up working in a minority neighborhood. This is always presented as a heroic sacrifice by the quota doctor, as if
Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills was dying to get him, but he felt such a strong sense of racial solidarity that he instead chose to work at a
VD clinic in Compton. A more realistic (if cynical) explanation for why people who wouldn't have gotten into medical school except for belonging to a
privileged minority tend to end up at low paying jobs in bad neighborhoods is because they tend to be
relatively lousy doctors. Under any system,
crummy parts of town will get stuck with
crummier doctors on the whole, but quotas mean that the worst doctors are worse than they have to be.