WASHINGTON, DC – – Today, America First Legal (AFL) demanded that the New York State Department of Health rescind their blatantly racist, unconstitutional, and corrupt policies that direct the rationing of medicine based on race. Their policies establish a prioritization scheme for the treatment of patients who identify as non-white or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity, denying life-saving treatment to constituents who do not fall under these racist requirements.
The New York State Department of Health use of a patient’s skin color or ethnicity as a basis for deciding who should obtain medical treatment is outright racist and appalling. AFL will not stand by while the State of New York attempts to establish a racial hierarchy in the provision of life-saving medicine, and we will continue to fight on behalf of the constituents of New York who are being denied medical treatment based on immutable characteristics such as skin color.
Statement from America First Legal President, Stephen Miller:
“America First Legal has already sued—and won—against the Biden Administration for its illegal and unconstitutional ‘equity’ directives that punish Americans based on their ancestral background. Upon taking office, Biden immediately issued an executive order decreeing ‘equity’ to be the organizing principle of his Administration. Equity is the left’s umbrella term for the use of raw institutional power—government, corporations, educational systems—to explicitly discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion or other protected trait.
In the wake of Biden’s EO, powerful entities across the nation have followed suit and implemented racist and discriminatory equity policies of their own. In arguably the most shocking example, New York has recently decided that equity directives will be used to decide who lives and who dies: to determine who receives lifesaving medical care based on the color of one’s skin or the nationality of one’s ancestors. This should appall the consciences of all who claim to care about human rights. It is a Pandora’s box that must be shut at once. If the State—with all of its immense coercive power, including the power to bankrupt, to seize property, and to jail—can now decide matters of life and death based on race, then everything we have come to believe about our liberties, everything we have relied upon, is obliterated. It is the path of tyranny and misery and unlimited government power—we must turn back now and rejoin the path of civilization,” Stephen Miller said.
Statement from America First Legal Vice-President and General Counsel, Gene Hamilton:
“Imagine going to a hospital with COVID-19 symptoms. You show up at the same time as one other person. The hospital has enough antiviral medicine to treat one person. The hospital looks at both of you and determines that your symptoms are the same—you both have bad cases of COVID—but the hospital decides to give treatment to the other person because of the color of their skin. That is blatantly racist, un-American, and completely contrary to our values. This cannot be the state of our healthcare system in 2022. These racist policies must be rescinded,” Gene Hamilton said.
Read AFL’s letter to New York State Department of Health here.
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