So much for doctor-patient confidentiality — Caesar Wynne has spoken with new bill
NationalPost.com – Full Comment
December 12, 2016. JOHN ROBSON
Hail Caesar! We who are about to be intimately inspected salute you. At least in Ontario.
You see, its new greasily named “Patients First Act” just brushed aside the hallowed tradition of doctor-patient confidentiality to let agents of the state inspect their business and your medical records without a warrant, copy them, and “question a person on matters relevant to the investigation.”
The ostensible purpose is to monitor local health integration networks and ensure that these central planning organs are delivering the efficient, compassionate service for which central planning is so famous. And it is deeply ironic to see the Ontario government, whose incompetent scandals extend from cancelled gas plants to two in health alone, eHealth and ORNGE, presuming to force efficiency and accountability on our wretched doctors and nurses. But the problem goes much deeper.
This law treats our right to privacy with shockingly casual disdain. Section 12.1 (6) says inspectors can’t look at your records without either (a) your consent or “(b) in such circumstances as may be prescribed.” Hail Caesar. And keep your arm up, because in a blizzard of “de-identify” and “anonymiser” jargon, Bill 41 alters no fewer than 19 different statutes. That’s how government works nowadays.
As Tocqueville warned in Democracy in America, given half a chance the state “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform … The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
The range of Acts amended by Bill 41, from the Smoke-Free Ontario Act to the Poverty Reduction Act, 2009, underlines that there is almost nothing in which Caesar does not now take an interest.
Shepherds are benevolent. But we are not sheep. Yet the range of Acts amended by Bill 41, from the Smoke-Free Ontario Act to the Poverty Reduction Act, 2009, underlines that there is almost nothing in which Caesar does not now take an interest. And very little in which Caesar’s interest is not distinctly peremptory.
Bill 41 is a severe breach of doctors’ privacy, their right to conduct their own affairs as they think best without state harassment unless clear indicators of possible wrongdoing persuade a magistrate to issue a warrant. But it is also an outrageous breach of our privacy in the most painful and intimate sphere. It removes your right to trust your doctor, to go and talk frankly about anything from an odd mole on your back that could be a death sentence to addiction, depression or marital woes and know your secrets will remain within the walls of his or her office.
As the state casually breaks its traditional restraints, we lose something very precious.
Empowering some bureaucrat to breeze in and fish through your medical files may make people less willing to seek help. It certainly diminishes us as individuals by depriving us of a sphere into which the policeman’s truncheon may not extend.
I’m all for rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. As John Locke says, we enter into societies and create governments because our inherent human rights are very hard to protect, in a state of nature, against organized or chaotic violence. But Locke also calls the notion that by entering into society we might lose the very rights we created government to protect “too gross an absurdity for any man to own.” Not any more.
Remember that the key feature of government, technically speaking, is coercion. It is the entity within the community that enforces a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. And while many governments through history have made a mockery of that legitimacy, from Xerxes’ to Stalin’s, in principle the state needs this power to prevent, deter and punish crime, and to repel invasions and put down insurrections. But not everything is Caesar’s. of the coercive power of the state, and of our fellows via the state, no matter how noble their motives. It’s not just that, human nature being what it is, power corrupts. It’s that government exists to protect our right to live our own lives, including our privacy in intimate moments happy, tragic or merely embarrassing. As the state casually breaks its traditional restraints, we lose something very precious.
Bill 41 was opposed by the Tories and NDP. But it passed with troublingly little notice or outcry. As Tocqueville also warned, “Subjection in minor affairs… does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…”
Caesar should salute us on our way to the doctor, not the reverse.
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Tags: Health, ideology, jurisdiction, mental Health, rights
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