Barack Obama’s Executive Action on gun control allows doctors to report patients to the FBI without consent

  Earlier today Barack Obama announced his long-awaited Executive Actions on gun control and as expected they included an expansion of background checks. It is hard argue that there should be no background checks but the dirty little secret is that most purchases already were subjected to background checks. However also included in his Executive Actions was something that I find troubling indeed.

  According to this article doctors can now report patients to the FBI without their knowledge or consent. Here is more:

While President Barack Obama’s planned executive action aimed at decreasing gun violence does include a plan for easier access to mental health care, it also calls for doctors to report mentally ill patients to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

According to details of the plan released by the White House, the rule allows for the Department of Health and Human Services to remove any barriers that could prevent health care providers from reporting patients with mental illnesses in order to disqualify those individuals from obtaining a firearm.

  Of course that barrier is the privacy of the patient, something I always thought was sacred, but here is more:

“Under this final rule, only covered entities with lawful authority to make the adjudications or commitment decisions that make individuals subject to the federal mental health prohibitor, or that serve as repositories of information for the [National Instant Criminal Background Check System] reporting purposes are permitted to disclose the information needed for these purposes,” a summary of the rule states. “The disclosure is restricted to limited demographic and certain other information needed for NICS purposes. The rule specifically prohibits the disclosure of diagnostic or clinical information, from medical records or other sources, and any mental health information beyond the indication that the individual is subject to the Federal mental health prohibitor.”

As Politico reported, the 1993 Brady law already prohibits individuals who have been involuntarily committed, found incompetent to stand trial or deemed by a court to be a danger to themselves or others from owning a gun. However, federal health care privacy rules do prohibit doctors and other health care professionals from sharing information regarding the mental health of patients without the patient’s consent.

  So basically, as I already wrote, the law has been changed and now the HIPPA rights of certain people have been disregarded. No longer can a person count on doctor/patient privilege. I wonder how many people will now not seek the help they need due to this law change…

  But don’t worry this only applies to a “limited demographic” and as the head of Mental Health America, an organization which is supposed to look out for the rights of mental health patients, said “That could be a barn door opened quite wide if an administration really wanted to open it, and they didn’t.”  I guess some mental health patients have more rights than others.

  But the bigger issue here is that while the door was not thrown open it was opened and we all know what happens when the government opens a door slightly–it is only a matter of time before the door opens wider and wider. This is just the beginning…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium