I hesitate to get you even more upset than you already are about the blatant “underrepresentation” of so many groups in so many areas of American life, but you can’t fret about this blight on our democracy as effectively as you should unless you know what I’m about to report to you (based on this report of this report) — that “fewer than 0.5% of the total physician population [of California] is of Cambodian, Loatian, Hmong and Samoan descent.”
And this despite the fact that Asian physicians in general are dramatically “overrepresented” — “About 26% are Asian or Pacific Islander, while 11% of the population is Asian/Pacific Islander.”
Clearly, we need a quota on Asians admitted to medical school so that we can get more … , well, other Asians into medical school.
ADDENDUM [10 April]
The commonplace rationale for admitting medical students by race is that, as the Report argues,
minority physicians are more likely than other doctors to practice in urban or underserved communities, which helps address health disparities between whites and minorities.
But that’s not really the real justification — but insofar as it is real, it’s not a sufficient justification. If it were, admission, grants, and loans to all medical students could be made conditional on the recipients agreeing to serve a specified amount of time in “underserved communities.”
I think the real rationale is closer to this “diversity”-based justification:
the new report says minority doctors are more willing to return to their communities, despite low payment from insurers like Medi-Cal. Moreover, these doctors provide better care because they are comfortable talking to patients with backgrounds similar to their own.
Here it is again:
Claire Pomeroy, dean of the University of California-Davis School of Medicine, said that health disparities will persist unless the health work force becomes more representative of the population. She added, “Medicine is not just technical skills, but connections between doctors and patients. Those connections are made by having a diverse work force.”
And here:
Medical officials said language barriers can result in miscommunication that leads to medical errors, and cultural differences can interfere with doctor-patient relationships – particularly for recent immigrants and their families.
“The fact is that people many times feel more comfortable and prefer to go to a physician who looks like them because of cultural reasons,” said Rodney Hood, an African-American physician who works in southeast San Diego.
But if the need for “diversity,” i.e., the need for the health work force to “look like” their patients, is the real cause for alarm over the “underrepresentation” of certain groups among practicing physicians, then the sort of statistics presented in this report are all but useless.
For example, this need for “diversity” would clearly not seem to be equally strong in all specialties. Does a Hispanic with a brain tumor or a broken arm really receive a lower quality of medical care if she is not treated by a Hispanic brain surgeon or orthopedist?
And what about those “overrepresented” Asians (26% of the physicians in California but only 11% of the population)? Don’t we need to know what they do? What if most of them are in research or specialties where their “Asian-ness,” whatever that might be, is not really relevant to the medical care they provide? Maybe Asians physicians are actually “underrepresented” among general practitioners where some believe their Asian identity might help.
If that is the case, the solution to that problem seems obvious. It is the same solution that everyone studiously avoids to the lack of “diversity” in higher education in general: just as black students should be drafted our of historically black colleges and sent to schools in need of the “diversity” they would provide (individual choice long since having been discarded as a liberal principle), so there should be limits (let’s call them “goals” and not “quotas”) set on the number of Asians allowed in certain specialties until the just demands of the “Asian community” are satisfied.
But wait. Even that won’t do, for there is no Asian community. There is instead a Hmong community, a Samoan community, a Japanese community, etc. We will need several new groups of statistics-gatherers and committees to oversee and manage the required racial and ethnic recruitment and assignment procedures.
In the 1960s and early 70s, affirmative action was solely about the underrepresentation of Blacks in fields such as medicine.
In the articles about UC Davis mentioned, Blacks are forgotten, and the primary underrepresentation is among Latinos (Central Americans and Mexicans seem interchangeable to UCD, unlike Hmong and Vietnamese.) When Samoans, Hmong, Guatematlans, Hondurans etc. are simultaneously making demands, demands, demands for proportional representation, it is clear that the assimilation mechanism has completely broken down.
Stories about demands from immigrant groups like those cited are the best argument for a time-out on immigration as in the 1925-1965 period.
The rule: Noone who demands racial/ethnic preferences for themselves, or is eligible for such racial/ethnic preferences under current law should be allowed to work or live permanently in the U.S.
Also, the arguments made by the Dean of UCD Med School and others in the San Jose Mercury article are virtually identical to the justifications for Jewish quotas in the 1920s-1950s.
Someone who actually attended Yale Medical School in the 1930s related to me how the Dean claimed Gentile patients would feel uncomfortable if too many of their doctors were Jewish.
Only a Leftist could believe that by using affirmative action to accept lower scoring minorities to medical school in order to send them to practice on other minorities is helping the minority community. Do they think they are doing the minority community a favor by subjecting them to substandard medical care?