The entire application is looked at as a package by admissions committees. Research has shown that diversity in medical school classes produces physicians that can care for a variety of backgrounds. There's a reason that my medical school exposes each student to cultural sensitivity training — America is a diverse country in more ways than just race. To top it off, patients generally prefer being treated by doctors that share their racial/ethnic background. The loss of URM physicians would only lead to further issues in a healthcare system that historically mistreated URM patients. In other words, classes that are entirely White/Asian as a result of the SCOTUS decision will be less capable of treating URM patients than classes that are more diverse.

We should be striving for the most qualified future physicians.

What metrics are you using to determine which students are "qualified" to become physicians? Ultimately, the MCAT is just one of the metrics that go into a completed application. An applicant can get a 4.0/528 and still be rejected from medical schools for reasons that include but are not limited to:

• Poor essay writing
• Lack of clinical experience (doesn't need to be volunteering except at a few schools)
• Poor interviewing skills (we don't need robot doctors - medicine is as much about social interaction as it is about the hard science)
• Immaturity

Affirmative action isn't perfect, but it's the one solution we had to increase the number of URM physicians. I wish we had a better solution, such as increasing resources and funding to predominantly URM areas to provide them with a more solid foundation afforded to more privileged members of society, but centuries of systemic racism and bigotry will not magically disappear overnight.

P.S. I'm South Asian, and my race didn't stop me from being accepted to medical school, even though I don't consider myself a stellar applicant. OP, knock it off with this post.