ARTS & FARCES internet

Just trying to make sure I’ve got this straight….

Kimberly Saenz is on trial for capital murder in Angelina County, TX for allegedly injecting ten dialysis patients with bleach. Five of the patients died; five others became seriously ill.

DaVita is one of the two largest for-profit providers of dialysis services.

Kimberly Saenz was employed by DaVita as a registered nurse in its Lufkin, TX dialysis facility.

1. Defense attorney Ryan Deaton has repeatedly and aggressively alleged DaVita has tampered with evidence and hindered the investigation by police.
• DaVita representatives admitted opening an evidentiary sharps container before calling police.
• DaVita representatives delayed calling police for eight hours after the five dialysis patients died.
• DaVita conducted its own internal investigation; the judge in the case refused to allow this into evidence.
• DaVita allegedly prevented police from speaking with its employees for 18 days—after its internal investigation was concluded—after the patient deaths.
• DaVita employees allegedly changed carbon filter tanks without proper documentation.
• A DaVita supervisor is alleged to have stated that she would not go down alone.
• The judge disallowed testimony by DaVita dialysis facility janitors that they removed bags of shredded documents from the DaVita facility on the day the police were called.
• Peter Cartwright, a Minnesota-based water treatment consultant, testified that the DaVita dialysis facility at which the deaths occurred “is the most poorly run and operated system in hemodialysis I’ve seen.”
• Jonathan Neidigh, an assistant professor of basic sciences and biochemist at Loma Linda University, testified bleach traces found in some of the bloodlines had to be placed there after the dialysis machine was stopped.
• A forensic pathologist, Amy Gruszecki, testified none of the deceased patients—not one—had any sign of hemolysis (the breakdown of red blood cells). Gruszecki testified that bleach causes red blood cells to breakdown.

Regardless of the verdict the jury returns in this case, DaVita clearly has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

[Disclaimer: I’ve been a DaVita in-center hemodialysis patient since February 2000.]

Louis Brandeis is remembered for many things, not the least of which is for writing “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” in a 20 December 1913 Harper’s Weekly article. As a culture, it’s taken us 100 years to get our collective arms around what Brandeis advocated. It’s clear the “publicity” he was referring to is what we now refer to as “transparency.” His entire statement was “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Having written incredibly effectively about the right to privacy in an 1890 issue of the Harvard Law Review, it seems Brandeis intended his Harper’s Weekly piece as a symmetrical companion.

I suppose 100 years late is better than never, and it’s really not a very good time to be a secretive spook. Consider the recent letter sent by US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and US Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) to US Attorney General Eric Holder calling for the declassification of secret court rulings giving the US government far broader surveillance powers under the USA Patriot Act than intended.

Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act allows the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to issue exceptionally broad warrants for just about any type of record—physical or electronic—including medical records, business records, library records, and internet access records. These warrants are exceptionally broad because the government need not show a direct connection between the records sought and a suspect. Instead, law enforcement agents need only assert the records would be relevant to an investigation.

“As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” Wyden and Udall wrote to Holder. The Obama administration—in the form of Arnetta Mallory, the Justice Department’s declassification director—has steadfastly refused to declassify and disclose the secret court’s findings, claiming that doing so would “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.” David Kravets, writing for Wired, reports Mallory reasserted that position a month or so ago in a court filing (.pdf; 254KB) in response to American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and New York Times Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits.

At the same time conservative state legislators push hard for union busting, right-to-work laws, employers are demanding social media logins and passwords from applicants. Coincidence? Not likely.

Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic, notes that publicly available social media information is no longer enough for the “95 percent of employers who use social media sites to glean information about job candidates.” Now they want the keys to root around in the information you’ve decided to keep private. “Employers are asking for applicant passwords—in part—because those applicants have availed themselves of social media sites’ privacy features,” writes Garber.

Manuel Valdes and Shannon McFarland, writing for the Associated Press, report on an interviewer demanding a statistician applicant’s Facebook username and password. The applicant refused, withdrawing his application. Once hired, employees are also increasingly being required to sign non-disparagement agreements.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys ... an egregious privacy violation,” Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor, tells Valdes and McFarland. But only Illinois and Maryland (.pdf; 111KB) have proposed legislation that would prohibit discrimination against job applicants who refuse to provide access to their social media profiles.

Predictably, Facebook refused to comment for Valdes and McFarland, issuing a statement that it forbids “anyone from soliciting the login information or accessing an account belonging to someone else.”

The US Justice Department considers using social media in violation of the service’s terms of service a federal crime—sharing login credentials is a violation of Facebook’s terms of service—but recently testified before the US Congress that it would not prosecute violations.

Earlier this month, US District Judge Charles A. Pannell Jr., in Atlanta, refused to dismiss a whistleblower lawsuit alleging fraud against dialysis provider DaVita. Pannell found allegations made by two former employees appear to have merit. R. Robin McDonald, writing for the Daily Report, reports that Pannel writes in his decision, notes that the complaint—filed by a nephrologist and a nurse—“is replete with allegations that the defendants intentionally manipulated their corporate protocols and thereby created false records in order to induce the government to pay their claims based on those records.”

The complaint alleges that DaVita schemed to pad corporate profits by over-prescribing incredibly expensive drugs and discarding the unused remainders as waste while billing Medicare for both.

US government prosecutors have declined to prosecute DaVita based on the whistleblowers’ complaint. “After a four-year investigation, the US Attorney in Atlanta decided last year not to pursue the case. But US Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said in her letter declining the case that the federal government was retaining the right to intervene,” writes McDonald.

Health insurance premiums for myself and my wife may be almost three times as much as our mortgage payment, but never mind. Saint Paul is the best city for healthcare in the United States. So says the new Rising to the Challenge: Results from a Scorecard on Local Health System Performance, 2012 from The Commonwealth Fund.

The study used 43 metrics for its assessment including access, quality, costs, potentially avoidable hospital use, and health outcomes. Saint Paul scored in the top 25 percent of all 10 health outcomes sub-metrics which included infant mortality, obesity rate, rate of smoking, and deaths from breast cancer.

Not for nothing was I instructed by our attorney when I was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease in February 2000 to get a tattoo that said, “I don’t care where you found this body. Ship it back to Saint Paul, Minnesota.”