Tag Archives: ethics

Patient Privacy

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The Wall Street Journal article headline says it all.

Google Strikes Deal With Hospital Chain to Develop Healthcare Algorithms

Alphabet, through its Google subsidiary, is going to be given access to patient records—patient identification, medical history, drug prescription and use, Internet-connected medical device use and medical device-originated reporting—by a major healthcare provision chain, HCA Healthcare Inc.

Dr Jonathan Perlin, President of HCA’s Clinical Services Group and Chief Medical Officer assures us:

Data are spun off of every patient in real time[.]

In real time. As the patient is hooked into the Internet via an ostensibly privacy-protecting connection.

The claimed goal of this…partnership…is to

develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.

However,

Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA….

But not necessarily with the consent of the patient, it seems.

Perlin does promise that patient-identifying data will be stripped before HCA passes patient data to Alphabet.

Of course.

Never mind that patient monitoring is tough to do without those data. Never mind that developing algorithms for monitoring patients is tough to do without those data in the mix for, you know, testing.

Alphabet’s penchant for taking user personal data for its own purposes, including monetizing those data for the company’s benefit, is long-standing and well-known. Now the company, with the active collusion of a major hospital chain, is expanding that reach into patient medical data—Alphabet user or not.

Patient privacy be damned. It’s a brave new world.

“Out of Balance Scales”

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Juan Williams has joined the Left’s baying at Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer over the latter’s rudeness in staying on the job, rather than politely retiring and getting out of their way. He began his own howl with a question that opened his recent op-ed at The Hill.

How political is today’s Supreme Court?

He continued, citing the well-known statistics journal The Washington Post:

The current 6-3 conservative majority on the court makes it “more conservative than the elected branches [House, Senate and presidency—all controlled by Democrats] to a degree not seen in 70 years.”
The out-of-balance scales of Supreme Court justice can be traced to the heavy hand of Senate Republicans.

Only a Progressive-Democrat like Juan Williams could say with a straight face that a Supreme Court that adheres to the plain, obvious, and rational meaning of the text of our Constitution and statutes is “out of balance.”

And only a Progressive-Democrat could decry his political opponents for insisting on a Court whose Justices adhere to their oaths of office and defend our Constitution rather than blithely “reinterpreting” convenient clauses according to their personal views of the day—or making it up as they go along (expecting the law to catch up) as one of Williams’ favorites, Justice Thurgood Marshall, so famously (or infamously) bragged—or insisting that Justices extend that concept to adhering to the statutes as written and then enacted by our political branches of government rather than rewriting them to suit their personal views of societal wishes.

And then the baying:

The realistic fight is to keep the current imbalance on the court from getting worse.
That begins with nudging Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the three remaining Democratic nominees on the court, to retire now.
Breyer is 82 years old. If he leaves the court now, he will be replaced by a Biden nominee….

How rude of Justice Breyer. How utterly political he is, to stay on a job for which he’s fully capable and well qualified still to do.

A Joke?

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President Joe Biden (D) was asked a question while he was playing around with an electric Ford F-150 truck, taking it for joy test drives around the parking lot of a Ford plant in Michigan.

Here’s the exchange.

Reporter: Mr President, can I ask you a quick question on Israel before you drive away since it’s so important?
Biden: No, you can’t. Not unless you get in front of the car as I step on it. I’m only teasing[.]

Only teasing?

This is part and parcel with his then-boss President Barack Obama’s (D) overt attack on journalists, arresting one, spying on another’s personal communications, spying on that one’s mother’s personal communications, attempting to blackball an entire news organization—all because they asked inconvenient questions.

This was no joke—Joe Biden was threatening a journalist because the man asked an inconvenient question.

Abraham Accords

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Allegedly—only allegedly—some peace deals might have been brokered by the Trump-Pence administration, with administration senior advisor Jared Kushner’s critical help.

But President Biden-Harris aren’t convinced. Ze said through White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki that

we don’t think they [the Trump administration] did anything constructive really to bring an end to the longstanding conflict in the Middle East[.]

Apparently, the Abraham Accords, bilateral peace deals between Israel and each of four used-to-be Arab enemies, are only figments of the fetid imaginations of President Joe Biden (D) and Co-President Kamala Harris (D). This is the disconnect from reality in the White House that our nation is saddled with.

“Merely as Districts”

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Recall the spendiferous $1.9 trillion bill enacted in March that President Joe Biden (D) and his fellow Progressive-Democrats have been pleased to call their “American Rescue Plan.” This enactment included funding explicitly for the States. Recall further that this…plan…seeks to bar recipient States from reducing their own tax rates as a condition of receiving the money.

…can’t use their share of the funds to “directly or indirectly offset a reduction” in “net tax revenue.”

Ohio demurred from that Federal intrusion into State prerogatives, as those prerogatives are made explicit in our Constitution’s 10th Amendment.

It’s possible that the Biden administration will lose on Constitutional grounds, as the Editors noted at the end of their piece, which centered on a Federal trial judge’s ruling allowing Ohio’s suit to go forward:

[I]n a preliminary opinion last week, federal Judge Douglas Cole found the state has a “substantial likelihood of success on that [Spending Clause] argument.”

But this is just an early skirmish in the Progressive-Democrats’ war on our federal republican system of governance. After all, this is the position of Biden and his brethren:

It is my first wish to see the United States assume and merit the character of one great nation, whose territory is divided into different States merely for more convenient government and the more easy and prompt administration of justice, just as our several States are divided into counties and townships for the like purpose.

And

…one of the first wishes of my heart, viz., to see the people of America become one nation in every respect; for, as to the separate [state] legislatures, I would have them considered, with relation to the Confederacy, in the same light in which counties stand to the State of which they are parts, viz., merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government….

No, wait—that was John Jay, both times, regarding the power he wanted in our then nascent central government prior to the Constitutional Convention.

Biden is just bent on reviving that. Americans successfully defeated Jay in those early days. We Americans need to defeat the Progressive-Democrats’ assault today.