Staff Reports
America’s hospitals and medical schools are supposed to prize competence, hard work, and the life-saving skills that keep families safe. Dr. Jared L. Ross is sounding the alarm that instead of merit, race and ethnicity have been elevated as primary criteria in medical training and hiring — a shift he and others say corrodes the standards patients depend on.
Ross’s warning comes as his group, Do No Harm, released a detailed report charging that the Association of American Medical Colleges and other institutions have woven DEI ideology into admissions, testing, and curricula, effectively reshaping medicine into a vehicle for political goals rather than scientific excellence. This is not mere academic nitpicking; it is a wholesale reorientation of priorities inside America’s most trusted institutions.
The practical consequences are predictable: resources and attention are diverted from objective performance and clinical outcomes toward programs that reward identity categories and ideological conformity. Critics rightly point out that initiatives like the Joint Commission’s new emphasis on collecting race and ethnicity metrics can become bureaucratic checkpoints that do little to improve bedside care while adding administrative burden. Patients care about competence, not checkboxes.
Of course, the institutions pushing diversity tell a different story, insisting that representation improves trust and outcomes in underserved communities and that systemic inequities must be addressed in training. There are genuine debates to be had about social determinants of health and access, but those debates should not permit the replacement of merit with political metrics or the elevation of identity over clinical skill.
Conservatives who love this country and respect the medical profession must push back hard against the creeping politicization of healing. When medical schools promote racially segregated programs or install ideologues into leadership roles, they risk producing physicians more focused on politics than on saving lives, which Dr. Ross and others have publicly criticized. It is time to restore medicine to a profession governed by evidence and excellence.
The fix is simple in principle: recommit to objective standards, audit programs that prioritize identity over competence, and reallocate money and effort back into training that emphasizes clinical outcomes and patient safety. Policymakers and hospital boards should demand transparency and measurable results rather than feel-good diversity reports that don’t translate into better care for Americans.
Patriots who pay for this system and rely on it for their health should not be silent while ideology reshapes medicine. Stand with those calling for a return to meritocracy in medicine — because the stakes are real, and the price of getting this wrong is paid in human lives and diminished trust in institutions once respected by all.
