News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
Today, the White House said President Obama’s alleged failure to keep an oft-repeated campaign promise to televise high-level health care reform negotiations on C-Span was necessary to protect the “private health information of the participants” under so-called HIPAA privacy rules.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 prevents unauthorized disclosure of patients’ health information, according to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, “and this reform debate has already had serious health consequences for several members of Congress.”
Indeed, Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., announced this week they would not seek re-election, after suffering painful bouts of voter discontent. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., tenaciously clings to political life after trading away his principled anti-abortion stance to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in exchange for his support of the reform legislation.
“These health reform discussions involve the most intimate, personal, often painful and embarrassing details,” said Gibbs, “so the negotiations should remain confidential — behind curtain, if you will — between the legislators and the health care experts who own them.”
The White House has spent several days dodging media questions about Obama’s promised C-Span coverage of the negotiations, so today’s answer came as a welcome relief to professional journalists who had found themselves in the uncomfortable position of fostering doubts about the president’s sincerity.
“All I can say is ‘Whew!’ ” noted one veteran White House correspondent. “Until we learned there’s a good reason to ban C-Span, the White House briefing room was filled with an unprecedented kind of tension. The questions were almost objective, if not downright skeptical. It was like Gibbsy had morphed into [George W. Bush press secretary] Dana Perino. … Scary.”
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world’s leading family-friendly news satire source.
