Cleveland Clinic Scrubs Race-Based Center From Website After Complaint

The Cleveland Clinic scrubbed references to its minority-only health clinic after a conservative group filed a federal civil rights complaint against the provider earlier this month. 

The Clinic removed information on its “Minority Men’s Health Center” from its website sometime after August 14, when the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services accusing the clinic of illegal discrimination. The complaint was filed on behalf of Do No Harm, an organization dedicated to depoliticizing medicine. 

The complaint specifically took issue with the clinic’s racially-focused “Minority Stroke Program” and the “Minority Men’s Health Center.” 

According to archived pages from its website, the Minority Men’s Health Center is focused on “minority health concerns,” and says it helps doctors “more effectively address health disparities in minority populations.”

Links that previously went to information about the health center now go to information about kidney health. However, references to the center can still be found in news releases and other pages on the website. 

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The minority stroke program, which is still featured on the Cleveland Health Clinic’s website, is “focused on preventing and treating stroke in racial and ethnic minorities” and increasing “stroke awareness among minority groups in order to lower stroke rates and improve stroke outcomes.”

The Cleveland Clinic has over 48,000 employees across 14 affiliated hospitals and 20 family centers in northeast Ohio. It also has several affiliated hospitals in Florida and a cancer center in Nevada.

Do No Harm senior fellow Dr. Jared Ross told The Daily Wire that the clinic’s racially-focused initiatives were illegal under the Civil Rights Act and the Affordable Care Act. He added that while the clinic removing references to the programs is a good sign, it remains to be seen if the clinic will revive the programs under a different name.

Ross said that both programs caused unnecessary division by separating patients by race. 

“Anytime we have segregation based on race, it’s harmful,” Ross said. “We have a huge politically incentivized faction that wants to bring back segregation and it’s really unfortunate to go back to this idea of clinics for white people and clinics for black people.”