HIPAA is the law here in the United States. It is a Federal law that protects patient privacy and prevents hospitals from releasing information about patients and that has very few exceptions. Basically, these are the exceptions:
- The transfer of patient information is necessary in order to provide appropriate medical care to the patient.
- The patient or, if the patient is unconscious, the patient’s next of kin, gives consent.
- The patient is under arrest and in the custody of the State.
- The police have a warrant for the medical records or medical procedure being requested.
If a nurse violates this law by, say, allowing a police officer to draw blood from a comatose patient without any of the above, she will at the very least be suspended, if not fired and have her license yanked by the state licensing board. Hospitals take this shit seriously. Not only is it the law, it’s their duty to their patients.
So anyhow, this cop by the name of Detective Jeff Payne demanded of the burn unit head nurse, Alex Wubbels, that she allow him to draw vials of blood from a patient for drug screening. He didn’t have consent from the patient. The patient was not under arrest. He had no warrant, he couldn’t get a warrant because there was no probable cause because the patient was the victim of a crash caused by a fleeing criminal and was not himself accused of any crime. From what I can figure, this detective wanted the blood in order to prove that the patient, a reserve police officer, was not under the influence of drugs at the time that the criminal’s car jumped the median and smashed into his truck.
Thing is, none of that allows the nurse to allow him into the patient’s room, much less perform a medical procedure. He’s not next of kin. He has no warrant. The person in the room is not in the custody of the State i.e. is not under arrest. Under HIPAA she’s not even allowed to tell him what room the patient is in without permission from the patient or the patient’s next of kin. So he’s demanding she break the law, and she puts in a phone call to the hospital’s administrator and puts the administrator on speakerphone to talk with the officer, and the administrator explains the exact same thing to the officer, i.e., that the nurse is not allowed under the law to tell him anything about the patient or allow him to do anything to the patient unless one of those last three conditions is true. At which point the officer goes fucking postal on the nurse, jacking her up and hustling her out the door and cuffing her because she’s there and the administrator wasn’t, apparently.
As far as I know, he still didn’t get his fucking blood, because hospital administrators were already on the way with lawyers in tow and put a stop to that shit. He was forced to let Nurse Wubbels go, and slunk away.
And his police department didn’t even give him a fucking paid vacation. They took him off of the phlebotomy program, of course. No fucking way was any hospital in the Salt Lake City area going to give him the time of day again. But hey, reprimand? Nope, didn’t happen. Suspension? Nope, didn’t happen. It’s almost as if a cop can just fucking assault anybody anywhere at any time for any stupid reason and the command staff just shrugs and says, “what can we do?”
Y’know, twenty years ago when the original “militia” neo-Nazi movements were breaking up in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, David Neiwert was committing acts of journalism and publishing articles tracking where all these fucking Nazis were going. What he found out was that a lot of them were getting hired by police departments that were busy staffing up due to Bill Clinton’s program to put 100,000 additional cops onto the streets and which correspondingly had lowered standards and didn’t look too hard at those people. Thus the FBI warnings about neo-Nazi infiltration of police departments. So anyhow, it’s 20 years later now. Those fucking Nazis are no longer just foot soldiers. They’re now in leadership positions in police departments all around the country. Thus the Oath Keepers hate group, which claims over 30,000 law enforcement members.
And this is the result — even the non-Nazis in police departments have absorbed the whole “ve must haff ORDER!” mentality of the Nazis, and disregard the whole law part of the term law and order. We live in a day and age where it doesn’t matter what the law says. It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says.
All that matters is the attitude of the cop that rolls up on you.
And that doesn’t describe a democracy. That describes a police state in all but name.
– Badtux the Sovok Penguin
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