I always look at affirmative action in the US with the perspective of someone looking at the reservations given to the "lower castes" in India to make up for the oppression of the past. If a "general category" (upper caste) guy and a "lower caste" guy with the same financial history appear for an examination to get into a Law College, Engineering College, Medical, etc then they lower caste person needs to achieve much less scores to get in. They have seats reserved for them which can never be transferred to a general category person even if no reservation caste person decides to appear for the exam.
You can't blame people if they are apprehensive about going to a doctor who comes from the lower caste, you'll always doubt his skills because he had it easier.
The thinking is long term. You have a large segment of your population that is economically underutilized. Getting more of them educated in this generation will help even more get educated in the next generation until eventually, you don't have this drain on your economic output caused by hundreds of years of discrimination.
The problem of undereducated doctors has always existed because only an already wealthy and historically advantaged few could go through the process of medical education without their family starving. After a few generations, doctors will be drawn from a much larger pool, and the ones who make it will be of higher quality.
That sounds good in theory but there are a plethora of jobs that the general category people can't get now, there's no way this is equality. I didn't do a good job explaining the situation it was just an overview, I'd be okay with this but in practise this is really harmful and will go on because they hold the votes.
Who said anything about equality? The goal is to become a developed country with broad access to healthcare and economic access, which will lead to faster scientific development that benefits everybody. The fastest way to get that is not to help the already wealthy a little but to help the people disadvantaged merely due to accident of birth a lot. More equality is a relatively inconsequential side benefit.
You could either make yourself slightly wealthier now and die with all the other wealthy people with today's life expectancy, or you could live significantly longer by increasing the number of people who participate in economic and scientific development.
There might be problems in the implementation of those programs, and that's what you should focus on fixing; however, the general idea is obviously correct to any logical long term thinker.
You can't blame people if they are apprehensive about going to a doctor who comes from the lower caste, you'll always doubt his skills because he had it easier.