Complaint Accuses Cleveland Clinic Of Racial Discrimination

Cleveland Clinic, widely regarded as the top-performing hospital globally, is accused of racial discrimination in an official civil rights complaint issued Wednesday by anti-discrimination healthcare organization Do No Harm (DNH). 

The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, alleges the clinic’s Minority Stroke Program and Minority Men’s Health Center engage in discriminatory practices by systematically excluding white patients in favor of minorities. The clinic receives federal funding and is subject to anti-discrimination laws that make such practices illegal.

The health care professionals and patients of DNH, who “[seek] to keep identity politics out of medical education, research, and clinical practice,” are represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL).

“[E]xtending the care efforts described by the clinic’s special stroke and men’s health programs to all patients who need it would be commendable,” WILL Associate Counsel Cara Tolliver and Deputy Counsel Daniel P. Lennington wrote in the official complaint letter. “Instead, a racially motivated focus has infected these programs — creating a racial dichotomy under which patients are prioritized and cared for, and displacing the otherwise laudable goal of helping humanity equally, without regard to one’s race.”

In an interview with The Federalist, Tolliver emphasized the real consequences of racially discriminatory healthcare the DNH hopes to end.

“[These] are everyday people in search of help regarding stroke and various other health conditions … encountering these racial preferences for programs that could be very helpful, and then being faced with the fact that Cleveland Clinic does not view or prioritize or otherwise care for all of its patients equally in the same manner, without regard to race,” Tolliver explained.

Discriminatory Programs

The clinic’s Minority Stroke Program is “focused on preventing and treating stroke in racial and ethnic minorities,” according to the medical center’s website. The program emphasizes the treatment of black and Latino adults and offers “[r]eferrals to other medical providers,” “transportation assistance for in-person appointments,” and “community education events,” among other specialized services. 

A 2022 Cleveland Clinic article reveals that the program targets “East Cleveland, a community where 90% of residents are Black.”

Gwendolyn Lynch, a stroke specialist and professor of neurology at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, directs the program.

The Minority Men’s Health Center is similarly discriminatory. The clinic’s website specifies the center “address[es] the health issues that particularly impact African American and Hispanic men.” It also states that the program was created to “address health disparities in minority populations.”

Like the Minority Stroke Program, the Minority Men’s Health Center provides a wide array of services, including health exams, primary care, “referrals for specialized care,” “prescription assistance,” and “spiritual care.”

“The goal Do No Harm seeks here is for the clinic to remove its race-based motivation and focus in these programs and open them up equally to all patients,” Tolliver told The Federalist. “They should not be segregating their services or offering separate tracks of services based on a patient’s skin pigmentation.”

The DNH is drawing attention to patients who are allegedly affected by racist policies that deny white patients the benefits of these services. 

“Race discrimination is a defining feature of these programs; and this discrimination is present and ongoing,” Tolliver and Lennington wrote in the complaint. “Everyday people in search of help … are faced with the fact that the clinic does not view, prioritize, promote, or otherwise care for all patients equally, in the same manner, without regard to race.”

Treating Patients as Individuals

The clinic cites disparate rates of stroke and other risk factors as justification for racial discrimination in its healthcare programs. Its website notes “deaths from stroke are two times higher in Black Americans than in Americans overall” and “nearly one-third of Latinos have diabetes,” among other statistics. 

In response to the initiative to balance health disparities, WILL attorneys emphasized that “anti-discrimination laws require treating patients as individuals.”

“[J]ust as Jim Crow segregations could not resort to race to allocate goods or services … Cleveland Clinic may not assume that a person needs any particular type of care effort based on race, nor attempt to ensure ‘proper’ racial balance,” Tolliver and Lennington wrote. “Treating individual patients as racial archetypes to ‘fix’ group differences is beyond the remit of a healthcare entity; and in any event, it is illegal.”

The complaint accuses Cleveland Clinic of violating Title VI and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Title VI outlaws racial discrimination for recipients of federal funding, like the clinic. Specifically, the Cleveland Clinic may not “provide services or benefits in a different manner from those provided to others,” “[s]egregate or separately treat individuals in any matter related to the receipt of any service or other benefit,” or “rest its actions upon any racially discriminatory purpose or intention.”

The ACA bans racial discrimination in “any health program or activity, any part of which is receiving Federal financial assistance.”

WILL attorneys argue that the clinic’s racially distinguished initiatives amount to “separate but equal” patient treatment, which has been illegal since 1954.

“[T]he underlying goals … rest on an impermissible interest ‘in race for race’s sake’— aiming to balance the scales of mortality and morbidity with nothing more than a bare reliance on a patient’s skin pigmentation,” Tolliver and Lennington wrote.

Hospital Executives

WILL notified Cleveland Clinic CEO and President Tomislav Mihaljevic and Chair of the Board of Directors Beth Mooney in a separate notice of complaint sent on Wednesday. 

“In short, race or skin color does not make a human being more or less healthy, and using race as a proxy for legitimate health risks is a dangerous practice,” Tolliver and Lennington wrote in the notice. “Cleveland Clinic should be operating its programming in a manner that equally prioritizes, promotes, pursues, and includes all at-risk patients, without reliance on racial stereotyping and segregated, distinctions.”

The official complaint has the potential to trigger an investigation of the Cleveland Clinic by the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Tolliver told The Federalist that DNH hopes the Cleveland Clinic will end its racial discrimination without further action, but emphasized the onus is on the clinic to take action.

“If Cleveland Clinic determines, in the meantime, to remove those racial motivations and the biases for its programs in favor of an approach of an equal approach to patient care, without regard to race, we will, of course, immediately withdraw the complaint,” Tolliver said. “Our hope is that it could be just that easy, and they decide to do the right thing in this case. So the ball will … be in their court and we will proceed accordingly.”

Monroe Harless is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.