Hospitals: Tools of Totalitarianism or Victims of Liberal Hysteria?
A Los Angeles hospital feels it necessary to share private patient information for purposes of “protective services for the President and others“. A full copy of the privacy policy is available here. The full explanation is that they “may disclose medical information about you to authorized federal officials so they may provide protection to the President, other authorized persons, or foreign heads of state or to conduct special investigations”. The fact that the provision is explicitly spelled out strongly suggests that the disclosure of information has already been made in the past. Is this a matter of a hospital being co-opted into an increasingly totalitarian state, or merely Liberal hysteria about legitimate law-enforcement activities? A close reading of the document suggest reasons for alarm from any person concerned about their privacy and civil liberty.
There are two possible explanations for the necessity of this type of disclosure. The less sensational, least objectionable, and most likely is that some person who the Secret Service is responsible for protecting, a person legitimately at risk of assassination, receives treatment at the hospital and oversight has to be made to make sure no potential assassins fake an illness gets close to their target. A far-fetched possibility, to be sure, but a reasonable one. For practical purposes, the Secret Service wants the names of people who will be near their protectee, just to make sure they are not dangerous.
The more sinister explanation is that this clause reflects a more sinister cooperation, with government agencies data-mining patient records for God-knows-what purpose. Reading the full privacy document suggest this is very possible, though not due to the clause previously cited. The privacy document does contain a proviso allowing for the sharing of information with law enforcement for the purposes of complying with a court order, or with clear evidence of criminal activity or issues of safety. This, again, is normal and reasonable. The hospital must comply with court orders, and cooperate with the police to report crimes and protect the public and its patients from imminent danger.
What is sinister is a third proviso for “National Security and Intelligence Activities: We may release medical information about you to authorized federal officials for intelligence, counter-intelligence, and other national security activities authorized by law”. That this third proviso is explicitly spelled out suggests a more nefarious activity different than the first two reasonable provisos. While the term “authorized” does suggest some veneer of legitimacy and adequate oversight, the explicit differentiation of the proviso from the reasonable law enforcement proviso suggests that this is different than the run-of-the-mill compliance with court-approved police investigations. It is no secret that many of the new data-gathering activities of the Federal government have suffered from serious problems of lack of accountability and oversight. The last “National Security and Intelligence Activities” clause for sharing information really does look like the willy-nilly data-mining of intimately private patient information with government authorities.
Considering the further requirements of doctor-patient confidentiality, a privilege as sacrosanct as that of lawyer-and-client or priest-and-confessor, one is also somewhat concerned that the hospital does not list safeguards in place to make sure that patient information is not erroneously disclosed, and that no record seems to be kept of how the information is shared. In this, the hospital is no worse than most health care providers. Sadly, patient confidentiality is fast becoming practically irrelevant and unenforced, with patients powerless in the face of seemingly omnipotent insurance corporations.
Yet the privacy provisions must further trouble a thoughtful person. Why does the National Security Agency, or the Central Intelligence Agency, or the Department for Homeland Security, need to know if I get an emergency appendectomy, and why should not they, at least, be required to provide an court-ordered subpoena to obtain this information? The troubling answer is that there is no pressing need for the information, but that the information is wanted as part of a much larger effort of a government spying on its own citizens, of the slow creep of ever-present surveillance in a misguided attempt to power an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent government. It is not totalitarianism, but it is an odious step on the road towards it.