Sorry, but for QA reasons it's still valuable to track. In the US, medical care is shockingly worse for people who medical staff perceive as one race vs another. Removing the line on the form will not prevent that.
You're welcome to propose that change, but I see it as being impractical. Not only would this require complex and expensive changes to health data infrastructure, but I doubt it would result in significantly better data. How many of the racially biased medical practitioners will correctly report the perceptions they're acting upon?
As Box said, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful." The current model is clearly wrong but clearly useful. You'd have to make the case that switching to your theoretically-less-wrong model would have a high ROI in terms of reducing unfair medical outcomes. But I think that's a very hard case to make.
The current model is 1:1 for patient:race, data entered by the patient. You are proposing a 1:n model with data entered by each practitioner. That is a different model.
And again, you haven't walked through the practical consequences of making this change and how it will improve fairness enough to be worth the cost of implementation. If you're serious about this, please do that. Otherwise it looks to me like you're just bikeshedding, and I don't have time for that today.
I don't think that's true at all. There are a ton of studies that have proved the problem exists, which has led to real efforts to fix the problem. How would we do that without data?
As the article explains, your DNA sample will not show how you are perceived racially by the people treating you. And it's that racial perception that has a big influence on quality of care in the US.
We cannot eliminate the box on the form until we first eliminate the biased care.
> We cannot eliminate the box on the form until we first eliminate the biased care
That is where the article ends: “the need to monitor” etc. But there is no logic to that. The biased care is eliminated by having the care providers not care about race, not by measuring it precisely. You can still record % of people who feel discriminated without doing the discrimination yourself.
Gosh, if it's that easy, why hasn't it happened already?
The truth is that's very hard. And if we can't measure it, it's impossible to tell which bias-reducing interventions work.
I get why white people, of which I am one, want to just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. But if there's anything that history demonstrates, it's that sustained power differentials don't just go away on their own. In the US, that's what both our Revolutionary War and our Civil War were about, as well as our civil rights movement. And things like the First Nadir and the Second Nadir show that even hard-won victories like those don't last without upkeep.
I can assure you, my answer to that question will equally not show how I am perceived racially by the people treating me. Maybe the people treating me should fill it out? Maybe they should also fill out if they perceive me as rather dumb or rather smart, because that might also impact my treatment.
Ok? But this isn't about just you. Enough people will answer this question in a way that it's still statistically useful to helping us work toward fairer outcomes. If you would seriously like to propose a systemic change you think even more effective in making things fairer, have at it. But please grapple at least vaguely with the actual difficulty in implementing your proposed change.
It has helped politicians. And that means if the problem is ever solved, politicians won’t benefit anymore. So lots of tax money is spent but the problem remains purposefully unsolved.
Seems like in matters of perception, the person to interrogate is the one perceiving, not the object being perceived.