Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Xavier Becerra on Friday identified “health equity” as the department’s top priority under his leadership.
“Health equity has to be part of everything we do,” Becerra said, during an address marking his first year in office. “You will see health equity pervades everything we do.”
For the left, “equity” means rationing and redistributing resources based on perceived oppression, privilege, and social status — typically based on race or gender identity.
Becerra’s commitment to the ideology marks an important milestone for a movement that has been proliferating among medical schools and professionals.
As Breitbart News reported, the radical group “White Coats for Black Lives” has infiltrated American medical schools, forcing the “equity” ideology into many aspects of medical decision-making, ethics, and hiring practices.
This group believes that “the dominant medical practice in the United States has been built on the dehumanization and exploitation of Black people” and therefore advocates “‘prioritizing’ black patients over other patients and ‘unlearning toxic medical knowledge and relearning medical care that centers the needs of Black people and communities.'”
Furthermore, the organization maintains that “whiteness is an invented political tool created through violence in the service of establishing domination,” “whiteness has been historically used as a violent means for stealing lives,” and “racism, capitalism, and white supremacy are interdependent systems which lead to the particular dehumanization, exploitation, and murder of Black people.”
Similarly, the American Medical Association (AMA) issued a 54-page manifesto called “Advancing Health Equity” which teaches medical professionals how to agitate toward critical race theory-centric policies and practices.
“Yet a rich tradition of work in health equity and related fields, including critical race theory (defined in the glossary), gender studies, disability studies, as well as scholarship from social medicine, gives us a foundation for an alternative narrative,” it says, citing a Guide to Counter-Narrating the Attacks on Critical Race Theory, “one that challenges the status quo, one that moves health care towards justice.”
Instead of focusing on a patient’s individual needs, the AMA contends that “inequities cannot be understood or adequately addressed if we focus only on individuals, their behavior or their biology.” Rather, political considerations are paramount to healthcare.
“This effort involves confronting the mounting evidence of the health effects of structural racism, while grappling with understanding intersecting, complex, and deeply entrenched ‘systems of power and oppression,’ including white supremacy … classism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and sexism,” the guide says.
A chart in the guide suggests replacing some commonly used words with other “equity-focused alternative[s],” such as replacing the word “fairness” with the phrase “Social Justice,” replacing the word “minority” with “historically marginalized or minoritized or BIPOC,” and using “oppressed” in place of “disadvantaged.”
It is yet unclear how Becerra’s determination to focus on “health equity” will affect how Americans receive healthcare.
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.