Dr. Jared L. Ross — an emergency physician who has worked as a first responder, EMT, paramedic, firefighter, and SWAT tactical physician — has gone public with a blunt warning: medicine is drifting away from merit and toward identity politics. He says race and ethnicity are increasingly being treated as more important than competence, and he argues that this shift threatens patient safety and the core mission of healthcare.
Ross points out that diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates have crept into certification and continuing education, putting physicians in the impossible position of choosing between their conscience and their career. He has publicly refused to sign a code of professionalism that he says forces doctors to affirm implicit-bias dogma in order to retain board access. That is not a debate about culture; it is coercion disguised as credentialing.
In the chaos of an emergency room, split-second decisions and trust between patient and provider matter more than ever, and Ross warns that injecting identity litmus tests into that relationship can be deadly. If patients are primed to distrust certain caregivers because of ideology-driven narratives, lives hang in the balance, and no amount of administrative virtue-signaling will change that fact. This is about outcomes, not feelings.
The broader problem is obvious to any American who still believes in excellence: when institutions reward identity over achievement, standards erode and mediocrity is elevated. We should be training and promoting doctors for skill, judgment, and results — not to fulfill arbitrary demographic checkboxes. Ross’s stance is a wake-up call to defenders of meritocracy who refuse to watch our hospitals be remade into social-engineering labs.
Critics of Ross will say that diversity improves care in some settings, and there are studies that document disparities and outcomes tied to provider-patient concordance. Those facts should be acknowledged — but they do not justify turning medical schools and certification boards into political engines that prioritize race over readiness. We can and must pursue both excellence and opportunity without weaponizing race as the primary credential.
Americans who put their lives in doctors’ hands expect competence and courage, not paperwork that polices their beliefs. Policymakers, hospital administrators, and certification boards must listen to frontline physicians like Dr. Ross and roll back any mandates that substitute ideological conformity for medical judgment. The health of our families and communities depends on getting this right.
Support for honest, patient-first medicine means standing with clinicians who refuse to surrender their oath to political fashion. Dr. Ross is not a fringe commentator — he is a working emergency physician sounding an alarm that should unsettle every American who cares about quality and safety. If we are serious about preserving American medicine, we will defend merit, push back on DEI overreach, and reward those who put patients before politics.
