Allen Bakke sued to get into UC Berkley Med school back in the 70's. Probably the first discrimination suit by a white.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CAN BE FATAL
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
Thursday, Aug. 14, 1997
On April 30, 1996, Sen. Edward Kennedy vigorously defended racial preferences in a statement to the Senate
Labor and Human Resources Committee.
``Affirmative action has paid enormous dividends in the medical context,'' he declared, suggesting that the
beneficiaries of race-conscious university admissions are ``likely in later life to . . . benefit their professions and
the communities in which they live.''
He offered proof. ``Dr. Bernard Chavis is a perfect example,'' Kennedy said. ``He is the supposedly less qualified
African-American student who allegedly `displaced' Allen Bakke at the University of California-Davis, and
triggered the landmark case. Today, Dr. Chavis is a successful ob-gyn in central Los Angeles, serving a
disadvantaged community and making a difference in the lives of scores of poor families.'' (In fact, Chavis's first
name is Patrick, and he lived not in central LA, but in Compton, a close suburb.)
Kennedy is not the only one to make Chavis a poster boy for affirmative action.
Anti-Proposition 209 activists in California, like student-radical-turned-politician Tom Hayden and Connie Rice,
counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, frequently cited Chavis during last year's volatile campaign.
Writing in The Nation, Hayden and Rice noted that while Allen Bakke became an anesthesiologist in Minnesota,
Chavis was ``providing primary care to poor women'' in a mostly black community. ``Bakke's scores were
higher,'' they admitted, ``but who made the most of his medical school education? From whom did California
taxpayers benefit more?''
It's a question they now probably wish they hadn't asked.
Eight weeks ago, warning of Chavis's ``inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a
physician,'' the Medical Board of California suspended his license. An administrative law judge, Samuel Reyes,
found Chavis guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the treatment of three patients -- one of whom
died at his hands. Letting him ``continue to engage in the practice of medicine'' the judge ruled, ``will endanger
the public health, safety, and welfare.''
The legal language of the judge's interim order barely conveys the horror of what Chavis inflicted last year on
Yolanda Mukhalian, Valerie Lawrence, and Tammaria Cotton.
On May 11, 1996, just days after Kennedy sang his praises, Chavis performed a simple liposuction on
Mukhalian. (Though specializing in obstetrics, Chavis's practice increasingly focused on liposuction. His training
in the procedure was a four-day course at the Liposuction Institute of Beverly Hills -- only half of which he
completed.)
Mukhalian's surgery left her vomiting, sweating, and urinating helplessly as, in the court's words, ``blood gushed
down her pants leg.'' But rather than get her to a hospital, Chavis took her to his home. She lay there bleeding
for 40 hours, yet Chavis provided virtually no supervision or medical care. She returned to his office on May
14, still bleeding and in pain. Chavis prescribed heat packs and a massage. Two days later, she was worse -- still
bleeding, in extreme pain, and growing delirious. He didn't return her calls. Nor did he examine her when she
returned once more on May 17.
By June 8, Mukhalian was in St. Francis Hospital with a severe abdominal infection. She was badly scarred, and
had lost 70 percent of her blood. By some miracle, she survived.
A similar miracle must have saved Valerie Lawrence, whose story is almost identical to Mukhalian's: a botched
liposuction, massive bleeding, shocking postoperative neglect.
But Tammaria Cotton wasn't as lucky. When Chavis performed her liposuction on June 22, her blood pressure
plummeted and she complained of difficulty breathing. ``If you can talk, you can breathe,'' Chavis reportedly
told her. As her frightened husband watched, ``reddish fluid'' leaked from her body for hours, pooling on the
floor. Instead of administering emergency treatment, however, Chavis vanished. By early evening, Cotton was
in cardiac arrest. She died en route to the hospital.
This is Kennedy's ``perfect example'' of an affirmative action success.
By himself, Chavis isn't an argument against affirmative action. Single examples do not constitute data. He is,
however, a reminder of something Kennedy and the others can't seem to grasp: Urban communities and poor
families don't need black doctors, they need good doctors. And when universities admit medical students on
grounds other than academic ability, they will turn out fewer doctors who are good.
In its 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court approved the system that put Patrick Chavis in medical school:
Lower academic standards for most black students in exchange for racial ``diversity.'' The result is that black
students for 20 years have been failing the national medical boards -- the leading measure of medical-school
achievement -- far more often than their peers. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association
found that while 88 percent of white students pass the exam, only 49 percent of black students do. The disparity
is caused almost entirely by lower admissions standards. Minority students admitted without regard to race
rarely fail their boards.
The cost of medical affirmative action isn't theoretical. It is paid in human suffering -- sometimes in human lives.
Maybe Kennedy and Hayden don't understand how. Tammaria Cotton's wider does. |
