Tag Archives: privacy

An Obamacare Outcome

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Dr Peter Weiss, a practicing physician, describes one.

I have now posted a notice in my office and each exam room stating exactly what Obamacare will cover for those yearly visits.  Remember Obama promised this as a free exam—no co-pay, no deductible, no charge.  That’s fine and dandy if you are healthy and have no complaints.  However, we are obligated by law to code specifically for the reason of the visit.  An annual exam is one specific code; you can not mix this with another code, say, for rectal bleeding.  This annual visit covers the exam and “discussion about the status of previously diagnosed stable conditions.” That’s the exact wording under that code—insurance will not cover any new ailment under that code.

What this means:

If you are here for that annual exam, you will not be covered if you want to discuss any new ailment or unstable condition.  I cannot bait and switch to another code—that’s illegal.  We, the physicians, are audited all the time and can lose our license for insurance fraud.

Yeah.  A separate appointment, separately scheduled for your new ailment.  Further, during your scheduled annual, note that bit above: “discussion about the status of previously diagnosed stable conditions.” That’s the exact wording under that code….  Your doctor’s discussion concerning your annual’s results are largely scripted by Uncle Sugar.  Talk about snake oil.

Oh, and good luck scheduling that separate appointment.  Keep in mind that your doctor, if you get to keep him at all, is part of a shrinking collection of doctors, and their work loads are exploding from all the new patients Obamacare is foisting off on them.  There are only so many hours in a day.

 

RTWT

Switzerland Giving up Its Tax Haven Status?

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Spiegel International Online has an article that discusses the possibility of Switzerland giving up a major portion of its banking secrecy laws under political pressure from the US and Germany.  Although the purpose of the article is to discuss the degree of importance (or lack) of the Swiss’ status as a tax haven to the Swiss economy, the discussion raises another question, immediately germane to our own economic condition, about tax havens generally.

Should we care if Switzerland remains a tax haven or gives that up?  If our own tax code weren’t so Byzantine, with such high rates, and with so many excused from taxes altogether (whether from the aggregate of subsidies, credits, exemptions, pick-a-loophole, or just from belonging to a protected class), Americans would have no need of tax havens.

If privacy is our concern, still we should be looking here at home, and reining in an overreaching government.  Sort of the kind of thing elections are for.

A Sense of Privacy

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Last week, the House voted, largely along party lines, to abolish the American Community Survey, the new version of the US Census Bureau’s long-form questionnaire, a survey that was supposed to be conducted annually, The Wall Street Journal reports.  Republicans claim the long form—asking about everything from demographics to income to commuting times—is prying into private life and is unconstitutional.  Oddly, the WSJ disputes this characterization.

That paper says,

[T]he ACS provides some of the most accurate, objective and granular data about the economy and the American people, in something approaching real time.  Ideally, Congress would use the information to make good decisions.  Or economists and social scientists draw on the resource to offer better suggestions.  Businesses also depend on the ACS’s county-by-county statistics to inform investment and hiring decisions.

But the WSJ is living in a fantasy world, as demonstrated by that adverb “Ideally.”  In the real world, we’ve seen the likelihood of “good decisions” (question for the WSJ: whose definition of “good?”) involving personal information emanating from Congress.  We’ve seen the quality of suggestions from the HSWIC* over in the government’s Energy Department.  As for the businesses, see below.

Leaving that aside, though, in the real world, stipulating the argument, the ACS still is an intrusion into my privacy.

The WSJ even shamelessly trades on its “authority” status:

National statistics are in some sense public goods, which is why the government has other data-gathering shops like the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics.

In the first place, they’re not goods of any sort, much less this baldly asserted public version, until they’ve been collected and thereby gained existence.  Even then, no, they’re not “public goods,” solely because they’ve been collected from a broad public.  They’re still made up of personal—private—data; having been collected up into a common database in no way places them into the commons.  In the second place, the WSJ has just made an excellent argument for abolishing the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics, also.

In the end, if these data have value for businesses, or any other entity, a market will develop for them (they’re not that hard to collect, and the barrier to entry into this market is, as my town puts it, speed cushions), and people can give up their personal data—or not—in accordance with their own decisions.  There’s no need to have these data confiscated by government fiat.

But the most amazing part of the WSJ‘s demurral is their rationale:

As for privacy, anyone not living in a Unabomber shack won’t be much inconvenienced by making this civic contribution.

Leaving aside the cynically Alinsky-esque claim that a confiscation is a “contribution,” when did individual privacy become something to be invaded at will, so long as it doesn’t “inconvenience” the victim?  Our privacy needs no justification from us to protect; we need no better reason to protect it—especially from a grasping government that’s supposed to be working for us—than that we don’t feel like being exposed.  The WSJ‘s logic is in line with the government’s logic of two centuries ago: the Indians aren’t using the land they’re on, anyway.  And we have a more important use for it than they do.

The inconvenience is the invasion of our privacy.  Full stop.

 

*HSWIC: Head…Scientist…What’s in Charge

Misleading Campaign for the Contraceptive Mandate

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Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Barbara Boxer, and Patty Murray (D; NH, CA, and WA, respectively) have an Op-Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal that contributes to the disinformation being spread about concerning this diktat.

They begin with their opening premise:

…the Obama administration changed the law to require private health plans to provide preventive services including breast exams, HIV screening and contraception for free.

They actually think no one is paying for this mandate?  They actually think no tax increases, no insurance premium increases, no reductions in services or policy option flexibility will result from this?  No, they don’t think that: these are grown, adult human beings, of far above average intelligence.  Of course they know better.

They go on:

…the real forces behind [an alleged campaign to deny this “benefit” to women]…are trying to force their politics on women’s personal health-care decisions.

Of course, this mandate in no way seeks to impose government’s politics to override the fundamental teachings of a broad reach of religions and religious institutions.  Nosirreebob.

And

Contraception was included as a required preventive service on the recommendation of the independent, nonprofit Institute of Medicine and other medical experts because it is essential to the health of women and families.

Aside from the fact that, as feminists used to protest—correctly—pregnancy isn’t a disease, pregnancy prevention (and cancelation) mechanisms are widely available already.  Not overriding religious teachings, not canceling religious tenets, in no way impacts this.

And

Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true.  Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church’s doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form.

It also means that religious institutions—including “institutions that have historic religious ties but also have a broader mission, such as hospitals and universities”—do not have to cast aside their fundamental beliefs, do not have to submit to a government order to ignore those teachings.  Catholic—and other—women still can exercise their religious freedom.  And they still have access to contraception and abortions absent this government intrusion.

The good Senators’ disingenuous claim to the contrary, this mandate has nothing to do with women’s health, except in the most peripheral, side effect way.  It is exactly an assault on religious liberty, it is a deliberate reach for political power and an assertion of government’s authority over what will be permitted to be taught by religious institutions and what teachings will be permitted to be obeyed by related institutions.  This is an attempt to bring down Jefferson’s wall of separation between Church & State, and nothing else.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D, WI) makes this plain.  She has said that the church

…can’t impose its religious views on people and whether they can have health care.

However, it’s the government that’s imposing its religious view: religions must act contrary to their fundamental tenets because Government requires it.  Moreover, “the church” certainly can impose its religious views.  It’s what a church is.  It’s God’s Word—regardless of the religion at hand—that’s being taught.  The question of individual conscience, as the Catholic Church (for instance) teaches, is still a matter among the individual, the church, and God—government is, in no way, permitted to interfere here.

Yet government is doing everything it can to interfere.

Rights Upheld

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Last fall, I posted about a right-to-privacy case that involved police planting a GPS tracker in a suspect’s car without court sanction.  To briefly recap,  police wished to track the comings and goings of a suspected drug trafficker, so they obtained a search warrant for planting a GPS tracker on the suspect’s car.  In execution, though, the police had let the warrant expire before they acted on it, and then they planted the tracker outside the warrant’s jurisdiction.

The government argued that attaching the tracker to a car’s underside was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter, and further that no one who drove on public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored.  Of course it was exactly this sort of cynical arrogance that contributed to our Founders’ writing into our Bill of Rights a requirement for the government to show cause to and get permission from a court before that government could invade and search an individual or his property.  Indeed, many of the government’s men understood this today; albeit they were breathtakingly careless in the execution: police had, in fact, obtained a warrant to attach the tracker, but within the District of Columbia.  However, they then installed the device after the warrant had expired and while the car was parked in Maryland.

Today, reports The Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling.  In a unanimous opinion, the Court said that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle—the Founders’ view, and American rights, were vindicated and upheld.

Still, the Court split in its opinion.  Justice Antonin Scalia, in the five-Justice majority opinion, held that the 18th century concept of “persons, houses, papers, and effects” included such private properties as 21st century automobiles in the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches (and seizures).  Thus, the 4th Amendment is technology-agnostic: our rights appertain to us, not to our property.  But we knew that from our Declaration of Independence.

Justice Samuel Alito went even further, in a dissenting concurring opinion (signed  onto by the likes of Justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Stephen Breyer).  Alito held that the warrantless (unwarranted?) GPS tracker implant not only violated the victim’s right of privacy, it violated his  “reasonable expectation of privacy,”  because, as the Court had held as long ago as 1967, “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”

Alito was quite clear in his reasoning, as summarized by the WSJ at the above link:

…a property-based approach was too narrow to guard against the proliferating threats to personal privacy modern technology posed.

In broadening Scalia’s argument, we see that technology agnosticism, again, with regard to our rights and freedoms.

In the end, the original obtaining of a warrant, coupled with the administration’s argument  that the warrantless search was only a trivial violation, demonstrates this administration’s utter cynicism when it comes to the rights and freedoms of Americans—and the continued need for the 4th Amendment to be applied rigorously and zealously.