Biden Plans on Providing Bonuses to “Anti-Racist” Doctors

Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration is now providing bonuses to doctors who “create and implement an anti-racism plan” under new rules the Department of Health and Human Services set. This move is designed to update Medicare payments to “reflect changes in medical practice.”

Starting on January 1, 2022, Medicare doctors can increase their reimbursement rates by carrying out “a clinic-wide review” of their practice’s “commitment to anti-racism.” According to HHS, the plan should span “value statements” and “clinical practice guidelines” and defines race as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one.”

The “rationale” behind the bonus, according to the new rules, is that “it is important to acknowledge systemic racism as a root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially-defined racial groups.”

The Biden administration has taken a liking to many of these anti-racism initiatives. Ultimately, it wants to enact them throughout the federal managerial apparatus and impose them across the nation. 

Sibarium noted that following Biden’s inauguration, he issued an executive order kicking off a “whole-of-government equity agenda,” one plan which consisted of the “equitable delivery of government benefits.”

HHS emphasizes that this new bonus plan is “consistent with” this order. It is complying with several steps the Biden administration has laid out to incorporate “anti-racism” into government policy. 

Back in November, the Department of Homeland Security listed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as some of its top priorities. This stood ahead of  “cybersecurity” as a key priority. 

The new rules made updates to Medicare’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, a scoring system that determines eligible doctors’ rates of reimbursement. Congress established that system in 2015 to reward clinicians for providing top-tier medical care, while also penalizing them for providing unnecessary, expensive services.

Doctors had been billing Medicare for services “regardless of how necessary they were,” asserted Chris Pope, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute. This reform was marketed as a way to control costs, and was passed with broad bipartisan support.

“Republicans who voted for [the scoring system] weren’t voting for this,” Pope commented. “The idea that this would be used as a tool of racial policy never came up.”

However, the scoring system did reward “improvement activities” that advance “health equity,” creating tools for HHS to insert ideology into medical compensation. The new rules tacked “anti-racism” plans to the list of the aforementioned activities, which are divided into “medium” and “high-weighted” categories. “Anti-racism” plans are situated in the second weighting category, giving doctors an additional incentive to enact them. Under this convoluted scoring system, the highest possible bonus a person could receive is 1.79% of a doctor’s Medicare reimbursements. 

Mixing Civil Rights Revolution style procedures with healthcare is a recipe for disaster. By letting the excesses of the Civil Rights Revolution and its woke progeny infect critical services like healthcare, America is on the path to national disaster. The embedding of wokism into every facet of American life will lead to a deterioration in the provision of public services and a generalized implosion of American culture.

This is just another reason why Republicans, if they had any spine, should stop all of these civilization-destroying schemes in their tracks.