Happy Holidays to Mr. Olson and the overlawyered.com community.

Bob

http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/special/mhguidance.html

“Where a patient is not present or is incapacitated, a health care provider may share the patient’s information with family, friends, or others involved in the patient’s care or payment for care, as long as the health care provider determines, based on professional judgment, that doing so is in the best interests of the patient.”

Translation: If you have a patient young or old who in your professional opinion is in medical trouble you CAN and SHOULD share your concerns with the above named people.

Hiding behind laws that don’t say what you think they say and result in harm to the patient reflects negatively against your professional judgment.

Funny, I though the argument was that the school turned a blind eye to a crime to protect a kid under the guise of saving the school’s bacon.

Tell me Allan, if the school had served food that was tainted and did not follow guidelines for food preparation that resulted in the death of the son, would you say the school had no responsibility to tell the parents their son was sick in a hospital?

If the school had a known OSHA violation in one of the engineering labs which resulted in the death of the son, would you be arguing the school had no duty to follow the law or take steps to insure the safety of the son?

If I surreptitiously follow you through the city and report back to someone, that’s spying. Conversely, if I merely happen to mention to your wife that I ran into you yesterday morning and that you were drinking again, that’s not spying. Your wife loves you and just wants to help you get your drinking problem under control.

So note that a proper libertarian position – not your straw man version, but the real thing – is that the institution will neither spy nor be forbidden from sharing info per its best judgment.

This is a legal site so formal rules are all the rage; that’s what lawyers do and how they think. But there are also times where judgment is preferred, or should be, because context matters. That’s why we have juries, for example. And the more complex the tradeoffs, the less applicable any set of rules can be.

This was a public school, UVA. Maybe we can argue the benefits of having government-sponsored schools. But we do.

So, we have libertarians arguing that a government institution should spy on our children and report their comings and goings to their parents.

I am not saying it is wrong. I am just saying this is not a black and white issue…

That would be the information that the law prohibited them from knowing?

Yeah, the son was an adult in terms of his age, but he wasn’t paying the freight for his college or the doctor visit.

More than anything, this line from the article should scare people:

“College records we uncovered years after Brian died documented secretive drug abuse from his freshman year through his senior year, but federal law had kept us from knowing.”

That reads to me that the college knew of the son’s drug use and abuse and kept it quiet. They were covering up not only to the authorities but to the kid’s parents a crime. There is something wrong when people say “the law demands that can’t tell you of a crime and also that your son’s life is in danger.”

We can say that everyone acted within the law, but that doesn’t mean the law is right or justifiable.