Health Policy and Medical Research

Do No Harm, a U.S.-based medical watchdog group that opposes DEI in health care, has issued a report attacking a prominent economics study on provider diversity in military medical facilities that has been cited to justify race-conscious hiring and admissions policies. The original paper by Michael Frakes and Jonathan Gruber found that Black patients had better outcomes at military hospitals with higher shares of Black physicians, and its authors explicitly suggested the findings could inform court and policy debates over affirmative action in medicine. Do No Harm argues the study never directly tests whether Black patients treated by Black doctors fare better than those treated by non‑Black doctors, instead using facility‑level physician demographics, and says some of the published results actually show the best outcomes when Black patients see non‑Black doctors at facilities that merely employ more Black physicians. The watchdog contends that the study leans on 'speculative' explanations and fails to rule out non‑racial confounders, calling it 'scientifically unsound' and warning that advocacy groups will deploy it in litigation to try to preserve racial preferences in medical hiring and education. The dispute highlights how a single high‑profile research paper is becoming a battlefield in the larger fight over whether federal agencies, courts and medical institutions will accept race‑based DEI rationales in the post‑affirmative‑action landscape.