The comprehensive NR+ reporting details the numerous mis-steps taken by the Garland DOJ. The case was finally scheduled to go trial in February - a clear sign they knew they would lose. They let Trump nuke the case to cover up their own partisanship.
ETA: The NR article is not paywalled, but the site seems to be having some technical difficulties.
2nd ETA: Firefox isn’t working for me, but Safari is.
I don’t know/care about the federal charges, but this guy most definitely needs to be punished by his medical association. Patient privacy is one of the foundational ethical principles that all doctors take an oath too. Intentionally violating privacy is an ethical violation that shouldn’t be left unpunished. In the real world ( maybe not Texas), if a doctor disclosed personal health information, to whatever end, their association would take action.
TMI, in the future you can just save us all the time and just post:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
See how much typing that saves you!
Because this is such a perfect example of your belief here. The doctor here is in the “in-group”, so not bound by laws. The trans children are in the “out-group” that you believe the law should not protect.
You don’t get to call yourself a “whistleblower” when you illegally access and disclose protected data for patients and hospitals that haven’t acted illegally.
I can’t speak to how DoJ handled the prosecution, but this guy is not a hero of any kind, and he deserves disciplinary action from his employers and medical association even if there’s no legal penalty.
As I said, even if there’s no legal penalty, he acted unethically and should be penalized by his employer and medical association. A hospital saying they’d stop offering services but continuing to perform those services is not illegal, and accessing patient data for people not under your care and then turning that info over to media and political groups is not “whistleblowing.”
The “Media” he leaked it to was Christopher Rufo. A propagandist with a long history of promoting false LGBTQ conspiracy theories and the inventor of the “CRT” nonsense.
It is very clear that he illegally accessed the private information of patients outside of his care, including names, treatment codes, dates of service and attending physicians. He then leaked much of this information to troll with a long history of false claims in an effort to damage the reputation of the hospital.
Haim did not raise concerns with Baylor or Texas Children’s about the gender-affirming care, nor did he use the anonymous hotline provided by Baylor, as specified in his HIPAA training. He leaked confidential patient data to propagandist.
The doctor admits he did all of this, he got off because criminality is celebrated by the MAGA crowd.
As a health care worker you can’t access the health records of people who you don’t need to for your job, let alone share that information with other people, without authorization.
I seriously doubt the doc went to any effort to de-identify or anonymize those patient records, or aggregate those records in any way.
Even if a record had some numeric patient ID# instead of name, it’s still identifiable based on values of all other fields (diagnosis, treating physician, Rx’s, date, time, etc…) With enough detail, records are as unique as having a patent’s name.
There was recently an incident I’m aware of where an allied health program almost lost their ability to send students to a major health care provider because one of their students who was on a clinical rotation asked nurses working on another floor about one of her friends who happened to be in the hospital on that floor. So the student didn’t even access her friend’s health information, she just asked about it and that caused a big HIPAA kerfuffle.
Criminal prosecutions of HIPAA violations are exceedingly rare, so there was no reason for the DOJ to get involved in the first place. As you said, it should have been left to his medical association and employer. In the case of sidewalk abortion protester Mark Houck, the DOJ took up a dismissed case and sent 20 agents with long guns to arrest him in front of his family. It took the jury less than one hour to render a verdict of not guilty on all counts in a humiliating rebuke. The Houck case blew up in the administration’s face, and the Haim case was headed to a similar result.
The initial indictment contained factual errors resulting in the need for a couple of superseding indictments that removed some of the original allegations. The claim about releasing unredacted patient information wasn’t true, nor was the claim about gaining unauthorized access to the patient databases, nor the claim about malicious harm to patients (all detailed in the NR+ link).
Both cases were partisan attempts to use the DOJ to intimidate those who disagreed with the administration’s positions on some hot-button social issues.
In this instance, you have it backwards. Not a single patient suffered any harm while Haim’s legal fees approach nearly two million dollars after being targeted by the DOJ.