Everyone is assuming the patient is wrong, and the hospital should have declared that his preference was wrong and ignored it. This may get me shouted down as a blatant racist, but the patient's request may have actually been reasonable. The patient, having very limited information, probably felt that he would get better medical care from non-black caregivers. There are ways to come to that conclusion besides bigotry.
You make your choices and you take your chances. If you think that black and non-black caregivers give equal care, that's great. If you think that black caregivers give worse care, but you are willing to sacrifice your health to avoid appearing politically incorrect or to fulfil your own moral obligations, that's great too. If you simply want the best care, and you think that skin radiometry or zodiac compatibility or sex or age has a CORRELATION to better care, and wish to choose your caregiver accordingly, I don't think that's a mark of bigotry, UNLESS that conclusion was arrived at through prejudice and bigotry. But MAY be logical and objective ways to come to that conclusion, besides bigotry.
http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm
Medical school admission is uncommonly competitive, there being many more applicants than slots. The competition is so intense that if black applicants were held to the same admission standards as whites and Asians, we would turn out almost no black physicians.
We now have a double standard for admission to medical school brought about by affirmative action. As a result, two tiers of American physicians have emerged separated by race and ability...We will quantify the performance gap for physicians.
A benchmark for medical competence is the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) Exam Part I...Dawson and her colleagues found that white medical students passed the NBME test at a rate of 87.7 percent and blacks at 48.9 percent. Again, using methods described in Appendix A, we found these pass rates equivalent to a black-white mean difference of 1.19 SD. Mean differences for the bar and NBME exams are conspicuously similar. The one-plus SD gap does not yield easily.
Notably, when Dawson's study looked at entering students with similar academic credentials, the pass rates on the NBME exam were independent of race, pointing an accusing finger directly at affirmative action. For all its good intentions, affirmative action has created two levels of competence in American medicine, separated by a bit more than one standard deviation. When you are wheeled into the ER at 2:00 a.m., if you pray, pray that the black doctor who greets you entered medical school through the front door.
Insurance companies don't have the resources to deconvolve correlation and causation. They don't have to, because correlation is actually closer to what the insurance companies actually need...actuarial and statistical reality, which will have the real effect on the insurance company's payouts and profitability. Understanding the underlying causes of correlation DOES have value if you can extrapolate those findings to new data sets and predict the correlations that will result. But if you already have the actual correlation, you already have what you need. So insurance companies charge more to insure red cars because more red cars get in more accidents. Period. There is no need or motivation for them to consider the 'fairness' or root causes of why red cars get it more accidents...it will NOT change their decision anyway; they will bill based on the hard data. They don't have 'fairness officers' that morph data from what 'is' into what it 'should be'.
When someone's medical care is on the line, are they to blame for making decisions based on hard data? Or all we all to care so much about political correctness and fairness that we ignore hard data and and sacrifice our health to avoid offending?
