AMA's Efforts to Weaponize Healthcare Bears Pernicious Fruit in New York City

A fundamental premise to the practice of medicine is the precious nature of human life.  This assumption stands true independent of race, ethnic background, national affiliation, or sex.  Simply put, every human life is invaluable, regardless of the patient's genetic or cultural make-up.  

In May, the American Medical Association, the organization supposedly representing physicians, released its "Organization Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity." on racial disparities in medicine recommending that physicians break the ageless practice of treating all patients with equal standing and importance, and instead engaging in active discrimination in the administration of treatments. 

Specifically, the AMA suggested that America's physicians plan the treatments with consideration for "investing and redistributing resources to the greatest need–with explicit consideration for how racism, gender and class oppression, ableism, xenophobia and English language supremacy impact outcomes." In its press release, the AMA explained, "The framework of the plan—which is central to the work of the AMA Center for Health Equity and the responsibility of AMA leadership, membership, and external stakeholders—is driven by the immense need for equity-centered solutions to confront harms produced by systemic racism and other forms of oppression for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and other people of color, as well as people who identify as LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities. The groundwork for the plan began in 2019 when the AMA Center for Health Equity was launched as a result of a resolution passed by the AMA’s House of Delegates."

From the outset, the United States Medical Association has called this out as being an overtly racist and dangerous undertaking that runs directly counter to medicine's most basic foundations and may even be fraudulent in nature as many delegates to the AMA have insisted that the organization never voted in favor of any resolution upholding critical race theory.  

And now, we are beginning to see the natural consequences of the AMA's policy position. The City of New York has released new guidelines on the treatment of COVID for New Yorkers and the allocation of the city's limited resources in that regard. A New York City health department described New York's "2021 Health Advisory #39" to the The New York Post as prioritizing the administration of COVID treatments preferentially to those neighborhoods that have “borne the brunt of this pandemic due to structural racism.” Additionally, according to Advisory #39, when considering the distribution of COVID medicine such as Paxlovid, the revolutionary new anit-COVID medication, physicians and healthcare officials are to “consider race and ethnicity when assessing individual risk.”

Outrageous and flagrantly immoral as such positions may be, they are the expected results from what the AMA is advocating for America's physicians and healthcare providers. Instead of attempting to place relative values on different groups, the AMA ought to stick to the Hippocratic Oath its members are largely called to obey, one dating back over 2,500 years, "I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous," without mention of race, ethnicity, or sex.

The great tragedy in this development is that the AMA is effectively working to undo centuries of progress in race relations. One of the great advancements in the United States, if not western society as whole, is the respect and equal standing with which members of humanity's different races are called to treat each other. The AMA now aims to destroy this progress in human rights by regressing into a new form of racism where the judge of one's worth is the physician. As long as the AMA's destructive policies are allowed to stand unopposed, the result will be more of these immoral and inexcusable standards that will place all of us on track of intensified division and animosity amongst races and ethnic groups.  

The United States Medical Association is a group of physicians and others who have seen firsthand the shifting medical landscape and the lack of any real representation — often time even representation working against our interests by major organizations that are supposed to be watching out for us — such as the AMA. Those organizations are not watching out for physicians, but the USMA will.

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