CHAZ Demands 'Race-Based' Healthcare, Which Is Illegal in the U.S.

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone has made a lot of incoherent demands since they took over the city of Seattle, but their demand for “race-based’ healthcare might be the most laughable.

They don’t just want more blacks as doctors and nurses. They want those black doctors and nurses to only treat black people.

This is illegal in so many ways it’s hard to count.

Newsweek:

Race-based health care, while having gained support, presents legal and practical challenges to implementation. Proponents say it’s one way to start closing disparities in health care, but it could take years and require changes to the education system to fill the shortage of black doctors, and CHAZ’s demand that black doctors be employed for the specific purposes of treating black patients isn’t quite legally sound.

“Isn’t quite legally sound”? Newsweek is being kind. It’s idiotic and people who advocate such nonsense need help.

If black people want a black doctor, that should be their choice. But we should gently point out that the human body is pretty much the same whether you’re white or black or some other color.

It’s true that blacks are susceptible to some diseases that whites aren’t. But anyone who paid attention in medical school knows this to be true and doesn’t need a handbook on exotic diseases to figure it out.

The question of medical outcomes relating to race is a question of quality of care, not skin color.

However, patients are within their legal right to choose their doctor and physicians and researchers support increasing opportunities for black patients to see black doctors. It’s not a new concept and data shows there’s merit to racial concordance between doctors and patients. Black people are more likely than white people to die at an early age from chronic conditions such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes, in part, because they aren’t being screened and treated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Whether it’s because blacks feel more comfortable talking about their health with a black doctor is unclear. But there is apparently a correlation between the race of a doctor and better health outcomes.

A 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research random clinical trial in Oakland, California, found black patients who saw black doctors were more likely to pursue diabetes and cholesterol screenings than those who saw non-black doctors. Based on the Oakland study’s findings, researchers estimated black doctors could reduce the black-white gap in cardiovascular-related deaths by about 19 percent.

So do we force black patients to see black doctors? Do we prevent white patients from seeing black doctors? We need more doctors regardless of color but recruiting black medical students is already being done. There is a legal obligation of medical schools to diversify their student bodies — and they’re still having trouble filling positions.

Wanting to be a doctor demands an interest in science, as well as anatomy, chemistry, and other scientific disciplines. It’s not happening in our public schools now. STEM studies are out of favor. Until there is more interest by black students in wanting to be doctors, CHAZ will be very disappointed.