The Biden regime continues to find new and inventive ways to contaminate every corner of American society with Marxist ideology that is poison to a constitutional republic, and that includes our healthcare providers.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that the administration will be offering bonuses to physicians and other healthcare providers if they implement “create and implement an anti-racism plan” within their offices via the Department of Health and Human Services, which is now, obviously, using tax dollars to push left-wing political ideology (and is that even legal?).
The outlet notes:
Effective Jan. 1, Medicare doctors can boost their reimbursement rates by conducting “a clinic-wide review” of their practice’s “commitment to anti-racism.” The plan should cover “value statements” and “clinical practice guidelines,” according to HHS, and define race as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one”—a dichotomy many doctors say will discourage genetic testing and worsen racial health disparities.
The “rationale” for the bonus, the new rules read, is that “it is important to acknowledge systemic racism as a root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially-defined racial groups.”
What’s galling is that Democrats and the regime continue to say things like “it is important to acknowledge systemic racism” as though there actually is “systemic racism” despite the fact that there isn’t (and we have more than a hundred years’ worth of constitutional amendments and legislation to prove how America has dismantled ‘systemic racism’).
But to be fair to HHS, the agency is merely following the regime’s lead, as the Free Beacon notes further:
Such premises have found a receptive ear in the Oval Office, which has taken steps to institutionalize them throughout the federal bureaucracy. Hours after his inauguration, President Joe Biden signed an executive order launching a “whole-of-government equity agenda,” one plank of which was the “equitable delivery of government benefits.”
The new bonus scheme, HHS stresses, is “consistent with” this order. It follows a series of steps by the Biden administration to integrate “anti-racism” into government policy: in November, for example, the Department of Homeland Security listed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as one of its top two priorities, ahead of “cybersecurity.”
The entire notion of “anti-racism” is a scam: The vast majority of Americans are a) already ‘anti-racist’ because b) they were never racist to begin with. And that goes double for the institutions we pay for with our tax dollars — or does it? If Biden felt the need to issue an ‘anti-racism’ executive order, it stands to reason he and his administration must have thought they were, right?
“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,” the Free Beacon added.
Chris Pope, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who worked on the legislation as a Hill fellow, told the outlet that prior to the system, doctors were billing Medicare for services “regardless of how necessary they were,” and so it passed with wide bipartisan support.
However, he said: “Republicans who voted for [the scoring system] weren’t voting for this. The idea that this would be used as a tool of racial policy never came up.”
Medicare has always straddled the line between medical and social policy, Pope noted. By conditioning payments on compliance with civil rights law, the program played a key role in desegregating Southern hospitals in the 1960s. In that sense, Pope said, the new payment scheme is “in tradition of how Medicare has operated since the outset.”
That said, “the world in 1965 is very different from the world of 2021,” Pope added.
Indeed it is, but you won’t get anyone in the Biden administration to admit that, obviously.
