Eliminate race-based medicine

 Hospitals shouldn’t look at a patient’s skin color before deciding whether he is worthy of a life-saving transplant. When Joseph R. Biden inhabited the White House, however, this was the way things were done. The mantra of diversity, equity and inclusion transformed into a mandate compelling action in operating rooms.

Last week, America First Legal (AFL) launched a series of lawsuits nominally against the administration of President Trump, demanding disclosure of records that would expose his predecessor’s manipulation of the medical profession. The group filed the initial freedom of information request last summer, but it has yet to receive material that deserves to be made public.

Mr. Biden’s health czars discovered “systemic racism” everywhere they turned, and their remedy for this malady was to impose reparations. They granted preferential treatment to certain ethnic groups when they needed an operation to replace their kidneys.

This DEI initiative grew under a model that Department of Health and Human Services and Medicare officials dubbed “Increasing Organ Transplant Access,” or IOTA. Announcements at the time described how the feds would reward hospitals that agree to adopt standards that segregated the sick using superficial characteristics.

“To further improve equity and access, the model would offer additional performance incentives to participating transplant hospitals to improve equity in the transplant process,” a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services press statement from 2024 explains. “The proposed model would require participating transplant hospitals to establish health equity plans to identify gaps in access among populations in their communities and develop strategies to address these gaps.”

In practice, this meant paying less attention to the 40,000 white men and women who are just as desperate for the chance to stay alive.

“With thousands of Americans dying on transplant waitlists each year, the public has a right to full transparency into how this program was created, because discrimination has no place in medicine,” AFL attorney Megan Redshaw said in a statement.

The group says a slightly toned-down IOTA model is still being used. It’s asking a D.C. federal judge to order the release of every “health equity plan” in the government’s possession so that the public can review whether objective medical criteria or progressive political dogma are driving these critical choices. It’s also seeking all internal HHS communications related to the scheme.

Similar discrimination happened during the COVID-19 panic. Individuals who refused the vaccine jab were deleted from transplant lists over their failure to join the ideological conformity exercise. This policy has had lingering side effects.

In a letter last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered Houston Methodist Hospital to clarify that it no longer requires COVID-19 vaccination for kidney transplant beneficiaries, which would violate state law.

Further straining the system, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed his agency had found that kidneys were being harvested from donors who weren’t dead. “Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” he noted.

Over 170 million Americans voluntarily checked the box to become organ donors in the event of their untimely passing. They assume the program is being fairly and properly managed. If trust is undermined by political scheming, fewer will participate.

Mr. Kennedy should settle all doubt by releasing the papers and outlining the steps he is taking to reassure Americans that doctors won’t choose who lives or dies based on ethnicity.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jan/29/editorial-eliminate-race-based-medicine/