What A Pain This Is

Very few of us have gone through life without a toothache, or a wrenched shoulder, or even a broken bone. So naturally we would want to make sure that in the future, there will be plenty of dentists, doctors and nurses to take care of us. To ease our pain, the Democrats are including in their health care bonanza plenty of funding for dental, nursing, and medical students and schools. Now even if you buy that concept, you're only seeing the tip of the toothache.

There are plenty of fiscal and conceptual problems in the Democrats' cradle-to-grave health care bill(s). But whether we're talking about grants, loans, incentives, stimuli, or contracts, the left will always manage to slip in one of their favorite social agendas, however expensive and of whatever constitutional dubiousness. It takes a trained eye and infinite patience to wade through the 2,000 + pages of the proposals. Fortunately, some respectable people have done so, and come up with this politically-correct and insidious provision.

Aside from the fact that the provision in question is outrageously expensive, and that pie-in-the-sky estimates of actual costs of socialized medicine are invariably grossly underestimated (see: Medicare), open-ended entitlements have a track record of becoming bigger, never smaller. So what's the entitlement for medical, nursing and dental schools? Well--billions, if you're asking about dollars. But it's more refined than that. These specific entitlement/earmarks contained in the House version are for special funds for racial and ethnic quotas in the medical and dental schools. Those affirmative action provisions have been plaguing us for years. But the progressives have gotten even cleverer than in the past.

Beside hiding the affirmative action language deep inside the bill, they have also added the word "underrepresented" and "disadvantaged" to "minorities." It would have been far too honest of the Democrats to include all minorities, or even most minorities. They should simply have said "these earmarks and their attendant quotas are based entirely on the classifications "black," and "Hispanic." Jews and Asians are numerical and statistical minorities, but in the liberal lexicon, they are neither underrepesented nor disadvantaged.

Those problems which would result in blacks and Hispanics being underrepresented or disadvantaged in graduate professional schools need to be addressed and solved at much earlier ages than that of the population preparing to enter the professional schools (or even the undergraduate colleges and universities). The huge underlying and systemic problems within the two favored groups cannot be solved by setting aside places for them in professional schools. The results of favoring certain groups over others has been that those blacks and Hispanics who would have been qualified on their own merits are routinely treated as "affirmative action kids," even though they are not. As for those who did actually receive the special treatment, the graduation and success rates are abysmal.

Likewise, having specially-favored blacks and Hispanics, the next logical leap (which has proven out in fact) is that the minority communities which these programs are most intended to help end up with doctors, nurses and dentists who barely scraped by and are now the major presence in those very beleaguered minority geographics. There are no genetic reasons why black and Hispanic students have so much trouble in grad school. It's certainly not a general lack of intelligence.

For now, at least, blacks tend to choose majors outside the hard sciences, so at least part of the "underrepresentation" is the result of perfectly free choice. For Hispanics, the choice is similar, but aggravated by the fact that second and third generation Hispanics are not "underrepresented" at all. Remove the heavy percentage of recent non-English speaking Hispanic immigrants and take away the huge number of illegals, and you are left with an artificially-created underrepresented minority (which is in reality close to a majority in many urban centers in the Southwest). The rest of the Hispanics are represented almost exactly in proportion to their actual numbers.

In the liberal scenario, Asians and Jews get tossed to the winds, and whites are left to their own devices. When the day comes (if it comes) that whites in America become a genuine minority, they will be joining the Jews and the Asians in the liberal non-special privilege minority category. What the race-baiters intend to do when the ever-increasing number of intermarriages become the norm is anybody's guess. I guess they'll just have to bio-engineer a whole new race of underrepresented minority special-pleaders.

My summation of this insidious revivification of affirmative action is "too little, too late, too expensive, too counterproductive."