Someone in the hospital faxed the names of some students hurt in a bus accident to a local law firm specializing in liability lawsuits. And this hospital---after months of investigation---has apparently determined there was no violation? The employee involved may have violated hospital policy, and whoever he or she is (ironically, that information is private!) could be disciplined.
Should those names be public? If the incident that put them in the hospital was a public event, I believe it should. If taxpayer funded police and fire departments were involved in the incident, I personally believe that raises the event to the level where the names and conditions of the people involved should be public. Obviously Congress disagreed with me when they approved HIPA.
But if releasing a name to the media is a violation of the person's privacy, how is releasing the name to a law firm not a violation?
ALSO: CNN has cancelled it's agreement with The Associated Press, a decision that may put the nail in the coffin of that venerated news gathering agency. That has great implications for the future of news gathering, and I'll write more about it in a future MMMM.
[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature on this blog, usually on Mondays, but sometimes, on other days of the week (like today, a Tuesday). Hard to believe this is the 100th I've posted.]
Happy 100th to me!
Yaay! Happy 100th MMMM to you, Tim!
ReplyDeleteAnd in other news...
• No, CNN won't be the death of AP.
• HIPAA is the acronym.
• Patients, upon their admission, are given the opportunity to "opt out" of having their names on a public roster of patients. Few do so.
• Right, wrong or indifferent, HIPAA was the brainchild of Ted Kennedy in 1996.
• FMLA was also his idea.
• The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), also enacted in 1986, which prohibits hospitals from turning away emergency patients because they have no health insurance.
• Mental health parity, provisions of which were enacted in 1996 and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.
• The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), enacted in 1997. Today CHIP provides coverage to more than six million children in low- and moderate-income families and has also prompted the enrollment into Medicaid of many children who were eligible for the program but weren’t participating.
• The Genetic Information
Nondiscrimination Act of 2008.
• The Public Health Threats and Emergencies Act of 2000 and successive laws passed since then. This legislation was the first to begin the effort to develop a national infrastructure to protect against bioterrorism — conceived and put in place before 9/11.
• The Breast and Cervical Cancer Mortality Prevention Act of 1990, which was the beginning of the federally funded breast and cervical cancer screening program for low-income women.
• The user fee programs for drugs and devices, a remarkably successful approach to providing the FDA with the resources it needed to move safe and effective products more quickly to patients while improving the ability to assure that approved products were indeed safe and effective.
• The Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997. This legislation included some needed streamlining of FDA regulatory processes but was most notable because Senator Kennedy was able, almost single-handedly, to block attempts to gut the agency’s authorities by the radical deregulation forces empowered by the Republican victory in 1994.