Do No Harm Wins First Major Lawsuit Against Discriminatory Biden-Era Healthcare Rule

townhall.com

Do No Harm originally started in 2022 to "safeguard healthcare from ideological threats" and now has over 50,000 members, including medical professionals and concerned citizens in every state and 14 countries.

Yesterday, the organization won a major victory over a discriminatory Biden-era rule that awarded physicians who implemented "anti-racism" plans with higher federal payments. Implemented in 2021, the Biden administration sought to advance its "anti-racist" policy agenda by instructing Medicare physicians to "create and implement an anti-racism plan."

Here's what Heritage reported about in the spring of 2022:

Your doctor’s plan should include “target goals and milestones,” measures to “prevent and address racism,” “ongoing training on anti-racism,” and other measures to identify “explicit and implicit biases in patient care and addressing historic health inequities experienced by people of color.”
The CMS rule is representative of Biden’s government-wide agenda to racialize public policy. Following Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021, Executive Order 13985 for “Advancing Racial Equity,” the CMS rule holds, “This activity began with the premise that it is important to acknowledge systemic racism as a root cause for differences in health outcomes between socially-defined racial groups.”
No serious health policy analyst denies the stark reality of health disparities among different racial and ethnic groups, but it doesn’t logically follow that racism is the root cause of those disparities.

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Thanks to the work of Do No Harm, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has now reversed that rule.

"Do No Harm applauds HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz for undoing the unscientific and discriminatory Biden-era rule.
While masquerading under the misleading ‘anti-racist’ moniker, in practice, these policies injected race-based decision making…
— Do No Harm (@donoharm) November 10, 2025

In a press release issued to Townhall, Do No Harm wrote:

Do No Harm achieved another significant legal victory after the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reversed a Biden-era regulation that offered higher federal payments for physicians who implement an “anti-racism” plan. Aimed at treating broad societal disparities regardless of their cause, the “anti-racism” rule encouraged doctors to use race as a primary factor in care over individualized medical treatment.
In 2022, Do No Harm challenged the rule, filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-Lasure. Specifically, the lawsuit argued that CMS’s adoption of the “anti-racism” rule unlawfully exceeded the agency’s permissible authority under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA).

Following the Trump administration’s reconsideration of its position in the case, CMS removed the challenged racial equity provisions in a new final rule published on November 5, 2025.

Townhall also spoke with Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Chairman of Do No Harm.

"This is a big win for us," Goldfarb said, noting this was the first major lawsuit filed by Do No Harm. Goldfarb said healthcare is a favorite target of such anti-racist policies, and noted that when the Biden administration implemented this rule, it was 2021 and the "peak of post-George Floyd" America. "They decided to go all-in on anti-racism," Goldfarb noted.

Trump administration officials met with Goldfarb and others and were "very receptive" to this rule change, Goldfarb said. "They're trying to get rid of this," he added, and appreciated the responsiveness of the Trump HHS.

Goldfarb said one of the motives behind such rules was rooted in the Biden administration's belief that the racial bias of healthcare providers drove all healthcare disparities, but the Biden HHS never explained what "anti-racist" meant or how the premise of systemic racism in healthcare had any credibility.

Four years after implementing this rule, Goldfarb said that we can't really tell if any physicians were actually paid for their "anti-racist" plans, and that we cannot yet know if such policies have positively impacted healthcare outcomes. Where outcomes did improve, Goldfarb said, it was because a hospital "improved some practices for everyone, not just Black patients."

However, the bigger damage done by this, Goldfarb said, is the "divisiveness and undermining of trust" that such policies cause, and that they put a strain on the relationship between patients and providers. "We have more racial difficulties because of these initiatives," Goldfarb added, "and that's the problem with identity politics."

Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points.

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