What Will Big Govt Do With Your Medical Records?

Conservatives wonder how Democrats can cower in fear that the government might overhear a phone conversation between a couple of terrorists, but feel perfectly comfortable about the government having direct access to everyone's medical records. In my little corner of Progressive Paradise, under George W. Bush following 9-11, the staff of the public library lived in highly publicized terror that the FBI might show up at the door and ask them who had borrowed books about how to construct truck bombs, and the library posted signs assuring book borrowers that the library would never tell the federal government what any user of that library had ever read. But today, seemingly the entire community dances in bliss that Obama's healthcare "reform" will give the government direct access to their computerized bank accounts. No signs posted anywhere promising protection from that intrusion.

As far as I can figure out, this double standard has something to do with the perceived halo that Democrats wear versus those pointy horns and red tridents that Republicans carry around. Democrats are trustworthy philanthropists, Republicans are, well, heartless scum. Something like that.

Thomas Sowell on the subject:

If the current legislation does not entail the transmission of all our individual medical records to Washington, it will take only an administrative regulation or, at most, an executive order of the president, to do that.

With politicians now having not only access to our most confidential records, and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters?

Could it be?

Sowell continues:

Does anyone still remember the hundreds of confidential FBI files that were "accidentally" delivered to the White House during Bill Clinton's administration? 

Even before that, J. Edgar Hoover's extensive confidential FBI files on numerous Washington power holders made him someone who could not be fired by any president of the United States, much less by any attorney general, who was nominally his boss.

J. Edgar Hoover. Hmmm. Wasn't he the guy who collected a secret wiretap file a yard thick on Martin Luther King, Jr.?

And, of course, no Democrats would ever create a scandal to influence an election or offer a "bribe" to influence a vote. Nah.

Earth to Democrats. . . .  Earth to Democrats. . . .  Are you entirely certain that you will always want to agree with the administration in power? You'll never want to anger a local political chieftain. Ever?

You'll just love those potholes and those zoning decisions. Every single one. Yes. And those property taxes and school board mandates. And think how much more you'll love them when your neighbors are afraid to step forward and complain. Or they get a little nervous about voting the wrong way.

It goes without saying, of course, that neither you nor any member of your family will ever contract an embarrassing or compromising medical condition that you wouldn't want "accidentally" made public, say, on the Internet?

I know, I know. I'm just wearing a tin-foil hat. It can't happen here.

After all, as historian Arnold J. Toynbee once observed, “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” (Toynbee quote courtesy of Mark Steyn via Pundit & Pundette).
 
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