Obama to Tweak Health Privacy Laws to Disarm AmericansEric Blair Since the tragic mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut, strong lines were drawn in the gun debate, yet most tend to agree that improving access to mental health should be part of any gun control discussion. It makes sense to the general public since all mass shooters are clearly mentally disturbed and most were found to be on anti-depressants or anti-psychotics. Not everyone who owns guns is mentally disturbed, but every mass shooter is, so lets just stop those people from buying guns, right? Obama intends to do just that. Reuters reports today that the Obama administration is preparing to tweak health privacy laws in order to beef up the number of names on the gun no buy list with people who have received treatment for mental illnesses. From Reuters: President Barack Obama said he wants to see state governments contribute more names of people barred from buying guns to the database, part of a sweeping set of executive actions he announced after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. The database, called the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, is used by gun dealers to check whether a potential buyer is prohibited from owning a gun. States are encouraged to report to the database the names of people who are not allowed to buy guns because they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, or have been found to have serious mental illnesses by courts. Many states do not participate. So the administration is looking at changing a health privacy rule part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to remove one potential barrier. Since broad gun control measures have failed to pass through Congress, Obama claims the power to take these actions without congressional approval. In March Obama signed anexecutive order to bolster the national gun registry. He directed $20 million to the Department of Justice to expand the NICS andincentivize states, territories and tribes to share information with NICS by closing information gaps that inhibit complete and accurate background checks. Reuters refers to these executive actions as small steps that can be done without Congress: So the administration has been left with a series of smaller steps it can take without congressional approval, such as tweaking the health privacy law to make sure it does not prevent states from reporting names to the NICS database. The privacy law Obama seeks to change without Congress is the Privacy Rule of HIPAA which sets limits and conditions on the uses and disclosures that may be made of such information without patient authorization and also gives patients rights over their health information, including rights to examine and obtain a copy of their health records. Although the exact tweaks Obama and the HHS plan to make remain undisclosed, the regulation itself already seems to give the executive branch great leeway in the sharing of private health data. Each so-called privacy protection detailed in the act has an exemption in case of an Executive Order. In other words, Obama can trample those privacy protections for public health and safety. In April, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that health privacy is secondary to protecting our children and communities from potentially dangerous individuals: In order to protect our children and communities, we must ensure that information on potentially dangerous individuals who are prohibited from possessing firearms is available to the background check system. We do not want to discourage individuals who need help from seeking mental health services, and our actions will be carefully tailored to ensure patient confidentiality as well as public health and safety. Its the same give-up-your-privacy-for-security excuse we see used over and over again by this anti-civil liberties administration, but this move has the added benefit of removing the 2nd Amendment as well. Two birds with one stone for an ambitious tyrant. But this will only affect a small minority of Americans, right? Wrong. A recent Mayo Clinic study revealed that a staggering 70% of Americans are on prescription drugswith antipsychotics being among the most frequently prescribed. Dr. St. Sauver of Mayo Clinic says the second most common prescription [after diabetes and heart disease] was for antidepressants that suggests mental health is a huge issue and is something we should focus on. Virtually every emotion experienced by a human being sadness, grief, anxiety, frustration, impatience, excitement is now being classified as a mental disorder demanding chemical treatment (with prescription medications, of course). The new, upcoming DSM-5 psychiatry bible, expected to be released in a few months, has transformed itself from a medical reference manual to a testament to the insanity of the industry itself. Mental disorders named in the DSM-5 include General Anxiety Disorder or GAD for short. GAD can be diagnosed in a person who feels a little anxious doing something like, say, talking to a psychiatrist. Thus, the mere act of a psychiatrist engaging in the possibility of making a diagnoses causes the symptoms of that diagnoses to magically appear. 