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SENATE BILL 221
A BILL PRETENDING TO BE THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT IT REALLY IS
Purporting to enhance confidentiality and confidentiality-like measures for the protection of individuals, SB 221 would actually further hide government errors and, potentially, worse. It seems like a civil libertarian-sort of thing. It makes “not discoverable and inadmissible in court” and exempt from the state public records laws (ORS 192.410 to 192.505) “all information procured by or furnished to the Department of Human Services, any federal public health agency or any nonprofit health agency exempt from (state) taxation or procured by any agency, organization or person acting jointly with or at the request of the department, in connection with special morbidity and mortality studies.” This actually does nothing for confidentiality - but it would kill accountability of DHS.
Several members of this legislature recently reviewed, as a joint interim committee, allegations of misbehavior by DHS in regard to a young boy named Trenton Aue. Trenton did no damage of bodily injury or financial harm to the state corporation or anyone else; he merely wanted to stay with the surrogate parents he had been with, and not get shipped across the state to ones DHS deemed more worthy than the replacement parents he’d come to love and trust. At key points in the hearing, when the questioning got too tough for the DHS representatives to handle, they called in the DHS lawyer, an articulate blonde lady. She explained to the legislators that her clients could not answer their questions, because doing so would violate laws the legislature had passed regarding confidentiality of information the agency possesses. She was using, in part, former Senate Bill 449, which I warned everybody in the legislature about. I had said it would block access to information for everybody except DHS and other state agencies the bill allowed DHS to share confidential information with. Here it was, at the April 12, 2003 hearing, that 449 came back to haunt the legislators. A law, purportedly created to protect kids like Trenton, was used by this attorney - to the visible surprise of the legislators - to deny legislative access to information needed to fulfill their legislative oversight function.
We mention the fact that the legislature got conned once by DHS not to say “I told you so,” but because SB 221 would take us even further down the road SB 449 pioneered: a purported confidentiality that does not protect the individual because there’s a loophole for DHS and other state agencies, but protects the agency instead, through disclosure restrictions that keep information DHS possesses away from parents seeking redress and legislators performing their oversight function. The “confidentiality” in 449 made redress of the harm to Aue - one of those supposedly to benefit from that confidentiality - impossible. SB 221, like SB 449, is a shield for agency wrongdoing.
Under SB 449, “We can’t tell you,” DHS has said, “even if we wanted to.” With 221, they could add, “And you couldn’t use it, even if we told you.” But DHS can use the information, garnered in many cases from what we believe are unconstitutionally intrusive student surveys (does your mom smoke pot; does your dad own a gun?), to bolster the agency’s claims for yet more money.
Who is hiding what with this bill? Hint: the statute is “in connection with special morbidity and mortality studies.” How many more children will DHS fail to protect from genuine killers and abusers while busy doing other things, before the legislature removes - rather than expands - the agency’s cloak of invisibility? When will the legislature accept responsibility for allowing something to go badly wrong at DHS Child Protective Services? A bill like this screams that something is wrong. Will the legislature fail to hear it, the way DHS failed to hear the screams of Ashley Pond and the other recent child victims who went unprotected by Child Protective Services? This bill will further legalize cover-ups into “child mortality,” and block parents’ redress through the courts as well as legislative oversight. Read it. That’s what it does.
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