Along with bills prohibiting abortion outright, or in certain circumstances, they're also pushing bills that go to the heart of the doctor-patient relationship, limiting where abortions can be performed, telling doctors what they have to say to their patients, and the like.
I think it's important to keep straight in our minds what these bills are. To say they are anti-abortion bills oversimplifies it, and it really plays into the other side's hands because abortion is more controversial among the general public than other choice related topics.
The Supreme Court has recognized in its precedents that the questions of choice, contraception, and procreation are decidedly based on our constitutional right to privacy.
You would think that a political party that pretends to a commitment to individual autonomy and limited government would be against these laws that restrict the doctor-patient relationship, wouldn't you? After all, not only do they impinge on the personal autonomy of the person, the interfere with what is, at least in part, an economic transaction between the doctor (vendor) and patient (customer).
That's right, a coalition of gun nuts and small government Republicans have decided that those private conversations between doctors and patients are just a little, well, too private, and the way to fix that is for the government to reach its hand into every doctor's office in the state, and tell those doctors what they are and are not allowed to talk to their patients about.
So let me get this straight. We need to have small government because it's un-American to have government interfering with people's private lives and individual economic transactions.
Except that if protecting privacy rights means protecting women's rights, well, then, privacy rights go out the window and so does small government.
Or if privacy rights interfere with someone's paranoid fantasies of big, scary government, well, there again, we can't stand up to those paranoid fantasies so the privacy rights get chucked aside.
We've talked about this a bit before. I won't give the whole history, but you can visit Green Mountain Daily's Pharmacy Fishing Archive for all the stories about collection of personal data by Vermont State Police on medical data from pharmacists throughout the state of Vermont.
Well, it's just gotten a bit more interesting. In some of the earlier discussion (I don't recall how much of this was private discussion and how much was posted online) involved a database to try to get a handle on illegal prescription drug use. What I didn't realize at the time was that the Department of Health had already begun developing that database and has, in fact, put out bids for the creation of it.
I'm a tech geek and know databases and secure information management extensively. After the fold, I'll try to explain exactly what this database can do, doing my best to translate tech geek into standard human English.
It may sound alarmist to some, but there's been some rather chilling developments in the realm of public surveillance lately that you should know about. There's plans from the Department of Homeland Security for a spy satellite program, which they assure us, "won't be used to spy on Americans".
Even more chilling, like something out of the sci-fi flick "Minority Report" is the WaPo story that lets us know about a new program that the FBI is up to:
The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.
This has been crossposted to Daily Kos. Note: I wrote the diary intended for both audiences, GMD and Kos, so I apologize if I spend too much time explaining Vermont politics or history, but wanted to be thorough enough for both audiences without having a radically different document from one to the other --julie
Thousands of us face myriad barriers -- financial, access, policy, intentional corporate interference and other impediments -- when it comes to receiving basic (or any) health care.
With a health care delivery system imploding in front of our eyes, the Vermont Department of Health is going full-bore with a new initiative. To aid physicians and patients in these troubled times of healthcare delivery collapse, the Department of Health has deputized enlisted the helping hands (and eyes) of law enforcement throughout the State.
Thinking of having surgery? Got a chronic condition? Do you have a spouse or family member fighting cancer? Does your child struggle with ADHD? Well, guess what the Department of Health's brand spanking new program will do to for you. For starters, it's designed:
-- to spy on patients, and -- to monitor the specific treatment practices your physician provides for you, and -- to transfer your confidential medical information to various police agencies and state investigators, all in contravention of Vermont law . . .
From the "methinks thou dost protest too much" department...
I find it interesting that the Republicans are pushing so hard to give Democrats a black eye over the fact that the law has unexpectedly provided an opportunity for shady operators to access the personal financial information of Vermont taxpayers through Town Offices. Consider some of those shady operators who are swooping in, doing that vulture-thing (from VPR, emphasis mine):
There's disagreement among town clerks - and among state officials - about whether the income adjustment information should be public.
Secretary of State Deb Markowitz has said it should be kept private.
But Montpelier's clerk relied on advice from the (Douglas) Tax Department. So she released 24 pages of data to two individuals who asked for it. One of the requests came from the state Republican Party.
Uh-huh. I guess they were for it before they were against it (before they were for it, since the changes in the law that created the privacy loophole were approved with a bipartisan majority). Or maybe they want to exploit the privacy hole themselves and close it up behind them as soon as possible.
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