I would prefer to not go to an affirmative action doctor.
Washington Post 2002: Patrick Chavis, a former Los Angeles area physician whose medical career was cited by both supporters and opponents of affirmative action as evidence for their case, was killed July 23 in Los Angeles. He was 50.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s homicide office said Dr. Chavis was shot during a carjacking. The spokesman said Dr. Chavis was leaving a store and entering his car when three men attempted to take his car and shot him.
Dr. Chavis received a degree of fame through the quest of Allan Bakke to gain admission to the medical school at UC Davis in the 1970s. The medical school rejected the application of Bakke, who was white, but accepted five black applicants, including Dr. Chavis, who had lower test scores and lower college grades than Bakke. The five won admission under a special racial- preference quota.
Bakke sued. What became a landmark case, Bakke vs. Regents of the Board of the University of California, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the school’s affirmative action program was struck down in 1978. The court maintained that while an applicant’s race could be used as an admissions factor, it could not be the only factor. Bakke was admitted to the school and later graduated, as did Dr. Chavis.
There it might all have ended but for the partisans on both sides of the affirmative action issue. By 1995, Bakke was an anesthesiologist in Rochester, Minn., and Dr. Chavis was an obstetrician-gynecologist in an inner-city section of Los Angeles, where his patients were largely poor women of color.
Nicholas Lemann, in the New York Times Magazine, Tom Hayden, in the Nation magazine, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., speaking before a Senate committee, all called attention to the careers of the two medical school graduates. They pointed out that while Dr. Chavis was helping the poor of California, Bakke made his practice among much wealthier, largely white patients in the upper Midwest.
Then, it all started to go wrong for Dr. Chavis. As reported by conservative commentators as well as by such newspapers as the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, Dr. Chavis lost his medical license in 1997. He had switched his practice to cosmetic surgery, including liposuction, areas in which he met with difficulties and was accused of malpractice.
An administrative law judge found Dr. Chavis guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in the treatment of three women, one of whom died, and the California medical board suspended his license.
