Quote:Under new Department of Health and Human Services guidelines, the Biden administration will pay bonuses to doctors who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” The move is touted as an effort to update Medicare payments to “reflect changes in medical practice.”

The Washington Free Beacon reports, starting January 1, Medicare doctors can increase their reimbursement rates by completing a “clinic-wide review” of their practice’s “commitment to anti-racism.”

According to HHS, the plan should include “value statements” and “clinical practice guidelines,” as well as a definition of race as “a political and social construct, not a physiological one,” a distinction that many doctors believe will discourage genetic testing and exacerbate racial disparities in health care. HHS claims the reasoning for the bonus 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 made several attempts to institutionalize social justice policies across the federal bureaucracy.

Only hours after his inauguration, Biden issued an executive order initiating a “whole-of-government equality agenda,” one component of which was “equitable delivery of government benefits.” HHS emphasized that the new incentive plan is in line with the order.

In November, the Biden administration also made moves to incorporate “anti-racism” into government policy when the Department of Homeland Security designated “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as one of its primary goals, even ahead of “cybersecurity.”

The new regulations modify Medicare’s Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, which uses a scoring system to set reimbursement rates for qualifying clinicians. In 2015, Congress established the system to reward physicians for providing high-quality, cost-effective medical care and punish them for giving needless, expensive treatments.

Chris Pope, a Manhattan Institute scholar who worked on the legislation as a Hill fellow, said doctors were charging Medicare for procedures “regardless of how necessary they were.” Additionally, he claimed that the payment reform was sold as a cost-cutting measure and that it had bipartisan support. However, the new system rewards “improvement activities” that aid in “health equity,” allowing HHS to inject ideology into medical compensation.

Clinics can also increase their reimbursements by using a “Trauma-Informed Care Approach to Clinical Practice,” which aims to “avoid re-traumatizing or triggering past trauma” but in 2018, the New York Times deemed multi-generational trauma “circumstantial at best,” claiming it “falls well short of demonstrating that past human cruelties affect our physiology today.”