IDrinkBloodLOL wrote:
Reub wrote:
I read the article and noticed that the doctor in the picture is an African American woman. Is it wrong to have worries that she might have become a doctor through affirmative action and may not be as qualified as other doctors?
That's a perfectly legitimate worry.
Does this make me a racist?
Are you more worried about being called a racist than about dying of medical negligence?
The fact that the worry is considered legitimate by someone who is training to be a physician just illustrates how harmful affirmative action policies are when it comes to work where expertise really matters.
The people who are hurt most by all of this are, of course, the African American physicians who would be outstanding physicians with no preferential treatment at all. These people spend their careers under an umbrella of suspicion about whether they got where they are through merit or through some kind of quota system.
When I was in law school, the school used a quota system where a certain number of spots were set aside for minority applicants, and the minority applicants only competed against one another. In subsequent litigation, it was discovered that most of the minority students admitted under this program were FAR below the level of non-minority applicants. In other words, most of the minority admissions were applicants who would have otherwise been nowhere near the level needed to gain admission. In class, it was often very obvious who these students were, and it was also obvious which minority students would have been able to get in without any preferential treatment.
As a social experiment, what I am describing is just garden variety government and bureaucratic dumbassery. The problem is that these marginal students get degrees from these prestigious schools and then go out into their communities and are hired by clients with real problems that need real solutions that require more than marginal skill levels in the professionals hired to do the work.
The people who are hurt are the customers and clients who put stock in what a degree from a prestigious school means, and, of course, the minority professionals who would have succeeded without any preferential treatment.
So I don't think Reub's point is one that doesn't deserve discussion if there is any issue about the quality of care being provided by a minority physician, but in the absence of any evidence that there is a quality of care issue, it seems like a needlessly inflammatory side note to the discussion of whether the way this physician runs her practice makes sense as a business model.