Our Reps Don't Know The Law*

"No health information is required in the application and why is that? Because pre-existing conditions don't matter. So once again we have my Republican colleagues trying to scare everybody. ... HIPAA doesn't apply. There's no health information in the process. You're asked about your address, your date of birth, you're not asked health information so why are we going down this path?" - Rep. Frank Pallone (D - NJ)

Representative Pallone went on to call the PPACA Implementation Failures hearing by the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives a "monkey court."

Well, someone seems to have misinformed Rep. Pallone but you'll likely get no retraction from him because as I've said in a previous blog entry the truth doesn't matter to most leftist political leaders. His cause is the religion of collectivist utopia where the Machiavellian process is not only moral, it's an absolutely necessity.

So what's the truth? The Healthcare.gov site requires an individual to set up an account before they can browse health insurance plans. On the very first setup screen it asks the website user to enter the information in the picture below:

Note what's included: name, state and email address. It asks for additional information later, but rather than getting into the entire site let's examine page one. The HIPAA Privacy Rule clearly states that "'Individually identifiable health information" is information, including demographic data..." Trust me when I tell you that your state is demographic data. More importantly, it clearly says that the data also relates to information that:

"...identifies the individual or for which there is a reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify the individual. Individually identifiable health information includes many common identifiers (e.g., name, address, birth date, Social Security Number)." (emphasis added)

Now I don't know about you, but if someone gives me their first, last and middle name, email address and state I can definitely find them. In fact, Facebook uses those elements in its primary search engine to look up users! In addition, as Rep. Pallone says "You're asked about your address, your date of birth..." HIPAA distinctly calls this "individually identifiable health information."

So Rep. Frank Pallone (D - NJ) was not just wrong. He was as Isaac Asimov put it "wronger than wrong":

"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

I've tried calling his office to correct the record but they won't answer my questions because I'm not from his district. Maybe you can try.

Washington, DC Office
237 Cannon HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-4671

*CORRECTION: While I still believe that Rep. Barton was 100% incorrect about the personal data being provided on Healthcare website, there is a strong argument that Rep. Barton was also incorrect. Per HIPAA, the law only applies to "covered entities" and its not clear that CGI Federal is among that group. To be a covered entity you have to be either a Health Care Provider, Health Plan or Health Care Clearing House.

Why I DON'T Believe The Climate Change Hysteria

I was having a Facebook debate with a meteorologist acquaintance of mine only a little while ago and the conversation got off on a tangent about Climate Change. He was making several very technical points about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and how the lack of temperature increase over the past 15 years was explained in the data extracted from the Agro system for observing various metrics in the Earth's oceans. Yeah, I know. Really boring! I exited the debate with a reference to the CLOUD experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which attempts to discern a link between galactic cosmic rays and cloud formation. This point was not trivial because contrary to the level of discussion in the media about carbon dioxide, the biggest contributing gas to the Greenhouse effect is water vapor (up to 75%). Please note that clouds are merely visible water vapor.

Okay, there's the context. Here's the first point. I'm not a climatologist and neither is my co-debater. In fact, neither is Al Gore, Barack Obama, Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman or any of the other very high profile provocateurs of Climate Change Hysteria (CCH.) Even in the case of Al Gore, he has no specific disciplinary certifications or peer reviewed scientific publications that make him a better arbiter of Global Warming Theory than you or me.

Notice how I switched from saying Climate Change to Global Warming Theory. That's because there is no single Climate Change Theory per se. That name is essentially a political creation due to the lack of actual warming of the climate. Like when liberals stopped calling themselves liberals and decided to go with "progressive" because the former moniker became a pejorative. There are at least 7 different theories on why the Earth's climate changes (the climate always changes): Global Warming, Bio-thermostat, Cloud formation and albedo, Human forcings besides greenhouse gases, Ocean currents, Planetary motion and Solar variability. But I digress.

It's very important to note that current Global Warming Theory has no experimental framework. In other words, there is absolutely no lab based experiment that can prove current Global Warming Theory. Almost everything is based on assumptions about the observed environmental impact of multiple climate variables. Those assumptions are documented by a Systems Analyst who writes a functional specification for a software engineer that subsequently converts that specification into programming code; a Climate Model application is born. So every IPCC assessment is essentially based on the output of a computer application, not a lab test. As the "scientific" observations mount and the data grows, the application is modified to incorporate the new model requirements. It's crucial to understand this, because the Climate Model application does exactly what the programmer tells it to do! So, if the programmer doesn't code for the other 6 climate theories then the model won't produce results supporting those theories.

The second point is, given a lack of special knowledge and understanding, those provocateurs can only logically believe in CCH because someone else told them to be concerned and they believed them. Yes, its a belief system my friends, no different than a religion. That's why they reference supporting data like the number of climatologists that concur with the theory. Scientific consensus they call it. Here's the thing though, there was "scientific consensus" that the universe was expanding at a decreasing rate. This was taken as dogma for decades until in 2001 three scientists proved that wrong. That's right only 3. They won the 2011 Noble Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." This new theory of universe expansion has called into question our understanding of how gravity works!

Which brings us back to the CLOUD experiments at CERN. If, as preliminary results have indicated, cloud formation is greatly impacted by galactic cosmic rays then the outcome of these laboratory experiments may just turn modern Global Warming Theory on its head. Furthermore, it may better explain the lack of warming over the past 15 years given that solar variation has been limited in recent years. In other words, the science is not settled and never was.

However, policy makers are trying to force closure on this issue because they know as more research is done, the Global Warming Theory may fall apart. Hence the rush to enact those policies.

This directly leads to my final point. The policies mitigating Climate Change have been esposed by environmentalist, socialist, collectivist, Democratic policy makers and even PETA for a very long time. How amazingly convenient that they now have a cause célèbre to push those policies. To wit, if you don't follow what they've always wanted to do for decades, then the destruction of humankind is imminent. Wait, that sounds familiar. A book from 1968 called The Population Bomb predicted catastrophe for humankind because of population growth. It suggested many of the same policies. Guess what? The authors were wrong on all counts despite their continued insistence of the validity of their predictions to this day (liberals never give up.)

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!