Health Department Ends Rule Incentivizing Doctors to Create ‘Anti-Racism Plan’

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has eliminated a rule that offered higher payments to doctors who created and implemented an “anti-racism plan.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an HHS division, eliminated the provision in a new version of the rule that was released on Nov. 5.

“Do No Harm applauds HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz for undoing the unscientific and discriminatory Biden-era rule,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, an association of health professionals that sued over the rule, said in a statement.

“While masquerading under the misleading ‘anti-racist’ moniker, in practice, these policies injected race-based decision making into the doctor-patient relationship. Such racial discrimination has no place in healthcare. By prioritizing evidence-based policies, HHS is working to rebuild public trust in our medical system.”

President Joe Biden, upon taking office in 2021, told federal officials to tackle what he described as systemic racism, in part by promoting “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment.”

CMS later that year finalized a rule that created a new activity for which doctors could receive reimbursement from the government. The rule said doctors could get paid to “create and implement an anti-racism plan.”

The plan should include a review of a clinic’s tools and policies, including clinical guidelines, “to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one,” CMS stated at the time.

CMS also stated: “This improvement activity acknowledges it is insufficient to gather and analyze data by race, and document disparities by different population groups. Rather, it emphasizes systemic racism is the root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially defined racial groups.”

Do No Harm and eight states filed a lawsuit against HHS and CMS in 2022, alleging that the rule encouraged doctors to racially discriminate.

Federal officials at that time defended the rule in court, arguing that Congress, in the law that established the Medicare reimbursement system, precluded the judicial review of the provisions that were being challenged.

After President Donald Trump took office, the plaintiffs and defendants both asked for, and received, a motion to stay the action after government officials announced that they were going to update the rule.

Do No Harm said that, in light of the new rule, it expects the lawsuit to be voluntarily dismissed in the coming weeks.