A top medical watchdog has taken issue with a commonly-cited study that has been used to push DEI policies.
The non-profit organization Do No Harm aims to reduce ideological influence in the medical field, and has released a report in which they “assess the relationship between the racial diversity of medical providers and racial health disparities in the use of preventive care and in patient outcomes” using military data.
“We use unique data from the Military Health System, where we observe providers as patients so that we can identify their race, and where moves across bases change exposure to provider race in a plausibly exogenous fashion,” the abstract reads. “We consider patients with four chronic, deadly, but manageable illnesses, where the relationship with the provider may have the most direct impact on health. We find striking evidence that provider racial diversity leads to reduced disparities in maintenance of preventive care and mortality.”
It is well established in the health economics and medicine literatures that, along many dimensions of health-care delivery, rampant disparities exist across patients of different races. For instance, evidence has shown that the rate by which Black Americans between ages 18 and 49 die from diabetes is nearly double that for white Americans of the same ages (Cunningham et al., 2017). The relevant literatures have also shown that the racial composition of the physician workforce is not representative of the underlying American population. While Black Americans constitute roughly 13% of the population, Black physicians in the U.S. account for only 5% of the physician workforce (AAMC, 2020). What is much less known to researchers is the extent to which these two sets of facts are causally related to one another. That is, to what extent will an increase in the diversity of the medical provider workforce reduce racial health disparities?
A press release from the organization detailed its findings more succinctly, Fox News reports.
The study, they say, “never actually tests whether Black patients fare better when treated by Black doctors, it downplays findings showing Black patients achieve their best outcomes when treated by non-Black doctors at facilities with more Black physicians, and it relies on speculative explanations for those results while failing to rule out non-racial factors that could account for the outcomes.
“We cannot allow politically motivated activists to push debunked racial theories that have no positive impact on patient care,” wrote Director of Research Jay Greene. “Studies like this are designed to codify DEI doctrine to pave the way for re-establishing affirmative action and enshrining race-based hiring. The report ignores the very question it purports to answer: whether black patients actually fare better with black doctors. Our report systematically exposes the study’s shoddy methodology and baseless conclusions. Americans of all races and backgrounds deserve high-quality medical research, not political ideology disguised as science.”
Ultimately, they conclude that there is no reason to use “racial concordance as a rationale for maintaining racial preferences in medical education and hiring,” according to Fox News.
“Advocacy groups wishing to maintain racial preferences in medical hiring will almost certainly cite the Frakes and Gruber study in future court cases and legislative debates about the issue,” the conclusion reads. “Frakes and Gruber consciously produced their study with this use in mind. But as is often the case with advocacy-oriented research, this study is not a reliable basis for making policy decisions. The Frakes and Gruber study appears scientifically rigorous and is authored by economists from high-status universities, but a closer examination of its methods, results, and motivation reveals it to be scientifically unsound and an abuse of academic authority.”
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Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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