Minnesota’s Health Assessment

During the Walz administration, Minnesota’s government has moved far left, with multiple radical pieces of legislation and rule issuance.  The entire administration is comprised of people hired only because of the color of their skin, ethnic background, sex, sexual orientation or other sops to the identity brigade; but of course most importantly they have to be ideologically pure–you can’t be too far left for the None Minnesota brigade.  One of these appointments is the current Commissioner of Health, with no experience or background in health care delivery or management that would qualify her for the role.  From her perspective, everything is seen through a DEI lens, but only in terms of favoring supposed disadvantaged groups. Inequities which clearly affect other groups are ignored.  There is no real committment to advancing the health of all Minnesotans or to understanding what initiatives actually improve citizens’ health, such as insisting that people take personal responsibility to change poor health behaviors.

Therefore, when the most recent annual state health assessment was released, unsurprisingly the entire focus and theme was equity, diversity, woke gibberish, etc.  Ideology over real understanding of health care issues and trends.  The Commissioner’s letter accompanying the report, found here (Comm. Letter), assumes that there is structural racism affecting health and that is responsible for any difference among groups.  The letter and the report are full of misinformation on every topic touched, all manipulated to support the false DEI narrative.  There is no recognition of the overwhelmingly role that personal health and health-care seeking behaviors play in an individual’s health status.  The greatest source of racism and the greatest failure to take steps to really improve health and health care in Minnesota are people like the Commissioner.

Important issues affecting the health of Minnesotans, like why health care costs so much in the state, what the role of excessive provider consolidation is, why quality has declined and why we have such high rates of drug abuse and alcoholism are ignored in the report.   There is absolutely nothing in the report about making actual treatment of people’s health needs better or cheaper.  Oh, but there is a whole section that is a nod to the climate hysterics and environmental whackos.  But here is one interesting nugget, from 2013 to 2021, a period in which the state was entirely governed by pro(re)gressive nutjobs, the average number of poor mental health days reported by Minnesotans more than doubled.  Now that is definitely causation, not correlation.

The pernicious influence of DEI in health care is also overwhelming at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where students are forced to take racist pledges to lunatic ideologies.  Students are selected on DEI criteria, not ability, and passed out of school and licensed on the same basis and then set free to terrorize patients.  It is hard not to believe that incompetence will become more widespread, medical errors will proliferate and patients will be injured and even die due to the failure to select the most knowledgeable, experienced and capable to be our physicians and other medical providers.  But don’t worry, the ideologues will sweep all the malpractice under the rug. These practices also undermine confidence in the medical system.  My advice is to only seek health care from older providers or those who clearly graduated from non-woke medical schools.  And don’t waste your time reading anything produced by the Minnesota Department of Health.