Not long ago, I spent a day inside a Hungarian hospital dealing with what seemed like an emergency situation with my left eye. Everything was fine, in the end, and I was treated efficiently and competently by doctors and medical staff. But the unpleasantness of waiting four hours to be seen for a condition that could have caused blindness in a matter of hours, caused me to complain to American friends about my first-ever encounter with European socialized medicine.
The blowback from Americans was unexpected, because if there’s one thing we Americans understand, it’s that American healthcare is better than what they have in Europe. We imagine that Europeans are tied to a socialized medical system that achieves fairness by delivering sub-optimal care to everyone.
Americans responded that I must not have had much experience in the U.S. medical system since the Covid crisis (true!), because the long hospital wait time for a putative emergency is far more the American norm now than it once was. In other words, American health care is now more like European health care in terms of inefficient service—but far more expensive.
Still, it is going to be very hard to convince Americans, especially American conservatives, that the U.S. healthcare system is not the envy of the world, and that we are lucky to have it. It might be more difficult to make that claim today, but it is still within the bounds of reason. For how long will this be true, though—and for reasons having nothing at all to do with a lack of resources?
American medical schools and other health care institutions have been ideologically captured by wokeness.
This has happened to a degree that even most Americans do not understand. When I tell Hungarians about the latest woke madness in America, they visibly struggle to believe it. They cannot grasp that a country as advanced as the United States would sabotage itself with ideology.
But it is true. A decade ago, when the fire of wokeness—the word we use for left-wing ideological extremism—was burning through the academic humanities, most of us Americans relaxed, certain that it would never cross over into the hard sciences. We were wrong. Look no further than the corruption of American medicine for proof.
Five years ago, a prominent physician at a major American hospital confided privately to me that the situation at his workplace reminded him of the Soviet Union, from which his family escaped when he was a boy. Why? The hospital’s administrators forbade all physicians from saying no to anyone, even children, who requested sex changes—this, even if in the professional judgment of the doctors, a sex change (‘gender confirmation’ is the ideological term of art) would be bad for the patient. Theirs was a decision made for ideological reasons only.
What’s more, said the doctor, the Human Resources department at the giant hospital monitored the social media accounts of all its physicians. They were expected to be active on social media—but were told that they could not publicly contradict the hospital’s line on sex and gender medicine. This doctor told me that if he refused to use social media, he would suffer professionally. Because he would not say things he didn’t believe, he simply posted dull, anodyne reminders to eat well and exercise. He had to, he said; to tell the truth, or even to remain silent, would have cost him and his family everything.
As bad as things were in the USSR, said the doctor, Soviet medicine never went so far as to embrace sex changes for children, and to forbid health care personnel from contradicting the ideological line of health care administrators. Only in woke America.
Five years on, there is now serious reason to doubt the future of American health care, for the same reason: its judgments are increasingly ruled by ideology, not science.
This month, Britain’s NHS began restricting hormone treatment for children and minors, becoming the fifth European nation to do so in the wake of studies raising serious doubts about their benefits to young people, and greater concern about their harms. In the U.S., though, this debate is barely happening. The ideological capture of the U.S. Government, the medical establishment, and the media by pro-transgender forces means that
to speak out against hormones and surgeries for minors is to risk your career.
Last week in Texas, I met Soren Aldaco, 21, a detransitioner who is active in the fight to protect children from gender ideology. Soren, who is autistic, began going down the dark path into transgenderism at age 11, after watching pornography online, and then making Internet friends in the transgender teenager community. When Soren was hospitalized at age 15 following a manic-depressive episode, doctors and other medical personnel began encouraging her to accept a transgender identity. She began taking prescribed hormones at 17, and had her breasts surgically removed at 19.
Now Soren believes that her mental illness and emotional vulnerability were exploited by gender ideologues in the medical field. She has filed a $1 million medical malpractice lawsuit against her doctors, and speaks out nationally against a medicalized ideology she says is destroying the minds and the bodies of young Americans.
Wokeness isn’t only ravaging American medicine via transgenderism, but also through race.
In late March at the UCLA Medical School, one of America’s best, medical students attending mandatory class on ‘structural racism’ endured Lisa Gray-Garcia, a so-called anti-racism educator, leading the class in a pro-Palestinian chant. She also ordered them to fall on their knees and say a prayer to ‘Mama Earth,’ and ranted about various woke causes. Someone in the class leaked audio of the bizarre ritual to the Washington Free Beacon, which published it.
The newspaper reported that Gray-Garcia referred to modern medicine derisively as ‘white science.’ And, said the paper, when one student remained seated in defiance of Gray-Garcia’s order to rise to participate in her ritual, the paper said ‘a UCLA administrator, whom the Free Beacon could not identity, inquired about the student’s identity, implying that discipline could be on the table.’
This sounds extreme, but it is not. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former official at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, has been sounding the alarm on how the push for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ in US medical schools is destroying the system that once educated the world’s best physicians. Dr. Goldfarb found that 75 per cent of the top fifty medical schools in America select students in part based on DEI and other left-wing political criteria.
‘The clear goal is to find the students who will best advance divisive ideology, not provide the best care to patients,’ Dr. Goldfarb has written.
Indeed, in 2022, the president of the American Association of Medical Colleges, the accrediting body of US medical schools, stated that DEI ‘deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.’ Think about that: the top medical educators in America are just as interested in building political cadres as they are in training physicians and medical scientists.
The politicization of science is a terrible thing. In the Stalinist period, the ideological pseudo-science of Trofim Lysenko destroyed Soviet genetics research. Lysenko’s fraudulent scientific theories about plant genetics coincided with Soviet ideology, and received Stalin’s full backing. Russian geneticists opposed to Lysenko stood denounced as ‘human haters.’ Many were fired from their jobs and sent to prison.
Lysenko and his followers denounced the normal science of genetics as a ‘reactionary bourgeois enterprise.’
Millions of Ukrainians died in the 1930s from Stalin’s man-made famine, made worse by idiotic Lysenkoist policies that reduced crop yields. Though Lysenko fell out of favor after Stalin’s death, Russian genetics research still has not fully recovered from its ideological ruin.
It remains to be seen whether or not America can avoid a similar fate. The signs of wokeness burning itself out are not encouraging. A panel of the American Bar Association last year voted to end the use of the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), in an effort to increase diversity, because too few blacks and Latinos could pass the test. Now campaigners are working to convince medical schools to abandon admissions testing for the same reason.
This is the kind of self-sabotage that only happens in societies that have been wealthy and technologically advanced for so long that they have forgotten how they got there.
It will not last.
My Budapest friends say that the healthcare system in Hungary is chronically underfunded. If true, this is a problem that can be fixed through political intervention, if Hungarian voters wish. But the problem that most threatens the quality and integrity of American healthcare—call it Woke Lysenkoism—is the kind of systemic infection that, if it takes root in Hungary, will be almost impossible to cure.
Fortunately, despite the serious challenges Hungary faces on the medical front, Hungarians seem to have strong immunity against wokeness. Don’t let down your guard!
