MADISON — On the week America celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., states and healthcare systems faced discrimination lawsuits over their policies making race and ethnicity a priority in the distribution of life-saving COVID-19 treatments.

Is this really Dr. King’s dream?

The race-based policies prioritize COVID-19 care for “non-whites and Hispanics” through “equity-based’ risk assessments.

In Minnesota, health authorities openly declared that “race and ethnicity alone, apart from other underlying health conditions,” will be considered when determining access to monoclonal antibodies (mABs) – with “BIPOC status” carrying more weight than Covid risk factors such as age and some pre-existing conditions. Minnesota recently paused the policy on threat of lawsuit.

Cornell Law School Professor William A. Jacobson recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a similar directive in the state of New York.

Jacobson, creator of the popular conservative blog site, Legal Insurrection,  argues New York’s race-driven healthcare policy runs afoul of the constitution.

“Directing medical professionals to award or deny medical care based on immutable characteristics such as skin color, without regard to the actual health condition of the individual who is seeking these antiviral treatments, is nothing more than an attempt to establish a racial hierarchy in the provision of life-saving medicine,” Jacobson states in the lawsuit.

Here in Wisconsin, it appears St. Louis-based SSM Health attempted to do the same thing, until it got caught.

The argument is that, “Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as long-standing systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”

That’s nonsense, but even if true, what these government officials are implementing are policies based on the racist theories of so-called anti-racism lunatics like Ibram X. Kendi, who believe “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”

Isn’t that what Martin Luther King Jr. preached against so long ago?

The people who preach racism in the name of health care are delivering bad medicine. They’re also tools of a broader campaign to resurrect the kind of inequality and discrimination King battled throughout his life.

And they collectively are Empower Wisconsin’s Tool of the Week.