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Racial concordance study ‘scientifically unsound,’ Do No Harm argues
A prominent study purporting to prove that black patients benefit from black doctors is unsupported by its own findings, because the data show black patients improved even when they didn’t see black doctors, according to an anti-DEI medical advocacy group.
The study was co-authored by one of the architects of Obamacare, MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, and contends to support the racial concordance theory that patients who receive medical care from physicians of the same race have better outcomes.
This theory is often cited in legal, political, and policy decisions to maintain racial preferences in medical education and hiring.
However, Do No Harm stated in its new report challenging the study — by citing its own data — that “the benefit for black patients in medical facilities that also have more black doctors is estimated to be even larger than for the black patients who see doctors of all races.”
Do No Harm has repeatedly challenged the racial concordance theory in a series of investigative reports over the years, and “Debunking Frakes and Gruber’s New Study on Racial Concordance,” published in February, is its latest critique.
Gruber, the prominent health economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did not respond to The College Fix’s requests for comment. Neither did his co-author, Michael Frakes, a Duke University law professor who teaches a course called “Health Care Law and Policy.”
Their study was first published as a working paper in 2022, and finalized in 2025.
They focused primarily on black patients within the military health system, and found “striking evidence that provider racial diversity leads to reduced disparities in maintenance of preventive care and mortality,” the two stated in their 2025 conclusion.
Jay Greene, director of research at Do No Harm and author of the critique, said there is an effort among left-leaning scholars to publish research in favor of racial concordance regardless of whether the data supports the conclusions.
“Studies from high status authors that draw politically desirable [results] tend to receive less scrutiny from reviewers and editors, allowing them to be published despite flaws that should have been detected by that process,” he told The College Fix via email.
“I hope that we have alerted other researchers and policymakers to the flaws in this study before it has entrenched itself in the popular understanding of what research has to say about racial concordance,” he said. “Catching problems early could make a big difference in how people perceive this study in the future.”
As Greene pointed out in his report, the Frakes and Gruber study did not examine the effect of patients actually being treated by a black doctor, only the health outcomes for black and non-black patients on a military base whose medical facility had a higher or lower percentage of black physicians.
“Interestingly, Frakes and Gruber never report the result from an analysis that examined the effect for black patients treated by black doctors. That is, they never conduct an analysis of the effect of racial concordance in a study that seems to be about racial concordance,” Greene wrote in his report.
This is not the first time that racial concordance research has been called into question.
“Physician-patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns,” also known as the Greenwood Study, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Greenwood Study claimed that newborn babies have better chances of survival when birthed by doctors of the same race. However, the researchers failed to control for birthweight, calling into question the accuracy of the study.
Studies like these are often used by advocates of race-based admissions policies to justify affirmative action programs. For example, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the faulty Greenwood Study in her dissent of Students for Fair Admissions to defend affirmative action.
Frakes and Gruber, in their study, argue their findings will help defend affirmative action in the wake of the high court’s ruling banning race-based preferences. Greene agreed in his report, stating the duo “consciously produced their study with this use in mind.”
“But as is often the case with advocacy oriented research, this study is not a reliable basis for making policy decisions,” Greene wrote.
“The Frakes and Gruber study appears scientifically rigorous and is authored by economists from high-status universities, but a closer examination of its methods, results, and motivation reveal it to be scientifically unsound and an abuse of academic authority.”
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