By Kaeo Yuen
On March 30, 2026, the Native Hawaiian Health Scholarship Program (NHHSP) was sued for discrimination because applicants must demonstrate Native Hawaiian ancestry. The plaintiff, an American organization, Do No Harm, claims to be “dedicated to protecting healthcare from radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideologies and policies.” This ornate characterization ignores the context in which NHHSP was founded and the role it plays in Hawaiʻi.
In October 1988, Congress enacted the Native Hawaiian Health Care Act (Public Law 100-579) to “improve the health status of Native Hawaiians.” This was in response to findings that Native Hawaiians faced significantly poorer health outcomes than the general population, alongside persistent barriers to accessing care.
From this Act emerged a Native Hawaiian health system, including NHHSP as a workforce pathway to address provider shortages, with nonprofit Papa Ola Lōkahi as the coordinating body. The purpose was to increase the number of Native Hawaiian healthcare professionals and ensure underserved communities across Hawaiʻi have access to care.
Since 1991, the program has awarded more than 330 scholarships to Native Hawaiians across more than 20 health and allied health professions, including medicine, nursing, psychology, and social work. In return, recipients commit to serving full-time in medically underserved communities across Hawaiʻi for two to four years. Scholars receive support for tuition and a stipend while completing their training.
The lawsuit reduces this entire system to a single claim that the program “facially excludes all races other than ‘Native Hawaiian’” and therefore constitutes discrimination. It argues that eligibility is determined by being the “right” race and that excluding non-native applicants is inherently unjust.
But this framing distorts the program’s purpose. NHHSP was never intended to function as a general scholarship open to anyone who wishes to work in Hawaiʻi, but rather as an intentional workforce pipeline created to address specific and ongoing disparities facing Native Hawaiians and the communities where those disparities are most severe.
The lawsuit further dismisses the importance of culturally informed care, asserting that research “does not support” the idea that patients benefit from having doctors of the same race. Yet in making this claim, it relies on a report produced by the same organization bringing the lawsuit.
This circular, self-supported argument assumes NHHSP was built on a theory of racial matching – reducing a complex healthcare reality to a single convenient conclusion.
In reality, the program is built on the need to recruit and train healthcare providers in communities that have long faced health challenges, where trust, communication, and cultural understanding shape whether patients even seek and accept care.
Native Hawaiian physicians remain underrepresented, and programs like NHHSP exist to address that gap. This lawsuit reflects a broader effort to recast targeted programs as discrimination while ignoring the conditions that made them necessary in the first place.
If efforts like this succeed, alongside the ongoing lawsuit against Kamehameha Schools, they will not stop at a single scholarship program. Organizations like Do No Harm, with a seemingly noble mission, will continue to dismantle systems meant to restore the health of, and rehabilitate, Native Hawaiian people.
Kaeo Yuen is a 2024 graduate of Kamehameha Schools Kapālama. He is currently a sophomore at Harvard and a teacher assistant at Ke Kula Kaiapuni o Pūʻōhala in Kāneʻohe.
 was sued for discrimination because applicants must demonstrate Native Hawaiian ancestry.){kind=link}