The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
Harm occurs when race is used as a proxy for characteristics stereotypically ascribed to members of a group, much as the obligatory mention of age is used to indicate the typical patient’s expected health status and vitality.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.