Defend Your Medical Data: The ACLU is mounting a campaign for public comment on the national medical privacy regulations proposed in November 1999 by the Clinton Administration. A previous accumulation of over 2,400 comments solicited by the ACLU was refused by the Dept of HHS on a technicality.

The ACLU says that the current proposed regulations are a reasonable first step and that their position is to encourage the government to take them further. However, from my vantage points both as a health care provider and a concerned citizen, they sound like ominous and objectionable privacy erosion!

The regulations dismantle real legal barriers to law enforcement and government access to medical records. Law enforcement agents would obtain patient records with simple written demands to doctors, hospitals and insurance companies without the necessity for judicial review or the issuance of a warrant. A patient would receive no notice or opportunity to contest the demand. The failure to require patient consent to release of information erodes the bedrock principle that patients own their medical records and must authorize the disclosure of their medical information or if they so choose, decline to give access.

Police would be free to browse all computerized medical records to seek matches for blood, DNA or other health traits. The proposed regulations in essence facilitate the creation of a government health databank. Although the system may initially be established to support “functions authorized by law,” the regulations themselves state that “government data are notoriously susceptible to expansion and abuse.” A major concern is that patients, when faced with the realization that government agencies might have access to their medical history, would avoid needed treatment or lie about their history.

Other recent ACLU concerns include support for Senator Patrick Leahy’s proposed federal legislation to protect innocent people sentenced to death; and an initiative against racial profiling in traffic enforcement, the nationwide problem euphemistically referred to as being stopped for “driving while black.”

February 13 is the 55th anniversary of the Valentine’s Day 1945 firebombing of Dresden Germany, one of the most ignominious and little-recognized moments of the Allied war effort. This was the single most destructive air raid in history, far surpassing the toll inflicted on Japan in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to come that August. At least 130,000 — some estimates place the figure as high as 300,000 — were killed when, in a three-day period, 3,400 tons of explosives & incendiaries were dropped, reducing six square miles of the city, famed for its artistic heritage and devoid of significance to the German war effort, to rubble. Many Allied officials were outraged–Germany was clearly on the verge of collapse, and the raids apppeared designed to inflict maximal civilian casualties on this city filled with refugees fleeing the advancing Soviet armies on the eastern front. It is far harder to argue in the German instance, as some do in countering antiwar revulsion about the use of the atomic bombs in Japan, that the attack was important to hastening the end of the war and may have saved lives. Kurt Vonnegut’s horror about Dresden apparently motivated the writing of Slaughterhouse-Five. On the other hand, the firebombing of Dresden has apparently become a rallying point for Holocaust deniers and other far right historical revisionists who focus on putative Allied war atrocities as “the real Holocaust of WWII”.

Today’s edition of The Daily Bleed, which I logged somewhere below, provides the above two links in its item about the Dresden anniversary. I have written to the listmaster asking him whether these links were included inadvertently or intentionally; if you’re interested, I’ll let you know how he responds.