A Stitch in Haste

Back in July I blogged about an atrocious plan by New York City's hack bureaucrats to require medical labs to submit blood test results to the city to track what has apparently become the latest public health crisis — diabetes.

Never mind that the sole past justification for tracking people, against their will, via their health records, was the threat of transmission — especially sexually transmitted diseases and double-especially AIDS. You can't catch diabetes from another person, so that excuse to violate privacy rights falls flat on its face in this situation.

So now we have a new justification: diabetes is "expensive." The city spends a lot on public health care related to diabetes. So the city has a "right," we are told, to track diabetics — who have committed no crime and pose no threat to anyone or anything except the city budget.

The program was quietly initiated on January 15. Which means that people are starting to find out about it. And which also means that the apologists are hard at work:

Maintaining medical privacy has become more and more expensive, both to individuals and to the public. The emerging question is whether medical privacy is a basic right or something more akin to a privilege for which those who want it should pay, rather than shifting the cost to others.

If this is the question that is "emerging," then the debate is "submerging" into a muck of illogical and un-American gobbledygook.

So now, we are told, it's not a question of physical or medical externalities, but of supposed "fiscal externalities" -- why should I be expected to pay for your medical privacy?

But this anti-privacy sophistry is built upon a contradiction. I'm not paying for your privacy and you're not paying for mine. We're all paying, through Medicare and other taxes, for our own medical privacy, and for everything else. Some pay more, granted, and some pay less. Some are net recipients of public health dollars, some are net contributors. But in the end, everybody pays for everything in our increasingly socialistic health care state, and it is therfore not legitimate for health care bureaucrats to start cherry-picking flows of funds by seeing only "diabetes money" or "obesity money" or "second-hand smoke money" or any other particular public health issue. There's just one giant ocean of taxpayer money that comes from millions of sources and goes to millions of uses.

And if that leviathan is somehow unfair or inefficient or expensive, then the answer is to rein it in, not to give it more tentacles.

And of course, if the government has a right to your blood sugar levels, can mandatory reporting of cholesterol levels be far behind? After all, statins are expensive too.

In a time when it seems as if we lose another bit of privacy with each passing day, do we really need to be embracing absurdities such as "medical privacy is too expensive"?

Privacy is a bargain at any price.