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Health care bill creates "Obamacare University"

November 19, 2014

The program is unassumingly titled the “United States Public Health Sciences Track,” and it’s among the many items hidden inside the massive, 2,000-page health care reform package adopted earlier this year. But it is anything but innocent. Instead, it is a first-of-its kind, federally funded and federally administered civilian medical school that grants advanced degrees (post-graduate, post-doctoral and technology) in medicine, dentistry, nursing and pharmacy, among others.

It will be run by Obama administration officials, namely, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who will determine the number of students who can enroll, and the Surgeon General, who will decide how to admit students, to recruit instructors and to write the curricula, among other tasks. Administration officials will act like college deans with the Surgeon General in charge of operations and the HHS Secretary in charge of funding.

Like the grants and contract sections of the health care reform law that require the use of race-based criteria for awarding federal money to hospitals and schools for medical training programs, the Surgeon General is required to create race-based selection procedures for admitting students into what I’ve named “Obamacare University.”

The more we know about the health care reform bill, the more unconstitutional and problematic it gets. The establishment of Obamacare U and its race-based provisions reinforce the importance of the Goldwater Institute’s efforts to strike down this law.

Diane Cohen is an attorney with the Goldwater Institute Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.

Learn More:

Goldwater Institute: Coons v. Geithner

 

 

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