More DMHC Sleaziness
I just received a note from DMHC lawyer, Troy Szabo.

First he claims that I was instructed by the Administrative Judge not to discuss the pre-Hearing meeting on my blog. The truth is I went over in detail with the Judge what I could and could not discuss. She in fact went back to Mr. Szabo to let him know that the meeting did not abrograte my right of free speech on matters that took place outside the "locked room" part of the negotiations. I have written an additional letter to the Judge to ask if that agreement still applies now that the DMHC has broken faith on those negotiations. I think it's in the public's interest to know some of the tactics that were used. Like I did at the pre-Hearing meeting, I specified exactly what I wanted to talk about for the Judge. I'm still waiting for her reply.

Mr. Szabo then declares that the DMHC is free to slip the additional section back into their original Order because it wasn't mentioned in the agreement I signed. The DMHC knew perfectly well that I thought I was signing the amended Order that we had all agreed on. It's sleazy of them to take advantage of some loophole or my lack of legal expertise. I was severely disadvantaged in that process, and I hope someone with more clout than me is willing to tell the DMHC that this was a crafty and downright tacky thing to do, and all of it so the DMHC can uphold an Order (and their ensuing press release) that wasn't legal in the first place.

The letter from the Judge is not the only thing I'm waiting for. Here are some of the other outstanding matters:

1. I'm waiting for contact from Governor Schwarzenegger's Office. Early last week, Senator Feinstein promised his Office was working "assiduously" to help me.

2. I'm waiting for any word from the OCR on my complaint about the violation of the whistleblower provisions of HIPAA. Last week I filed an additional request that the OCR verify the count of Private Health Information items in the Systems Diagrams, because I believe Kaiser manufactured the 140 number to create a public scare so they could rapidly abrograte my right of free speech (Kaiser had other reasons besides concerns for patient privacy to make the Systems Diagrams vanish). The OCR has not confirmed whether they will act on this additional request.

3. I'm waiting for any offer of help from an attorney or a public interest foundation. I still need help with getting the press that were duped by Kaiser's Injunction trick to retract various misconceptions and falsehoods (particularly the SF Chronicle, but also a host of smaller news venues that Kaiser's PR team seems to have contacted directly). It would probably help a great deal if I could get the Injunction removed in the first place, even as harmless as it is, since most journalists seem unwilling to mention that I was not represented by an attorney, and the Judge didn't even read my opposition papers.

Update: Kaiser just sent me a renewed notice for their lawsuit, and a demand for me to respond within 15 days. I suspect this has something to do with the fact I've been publicly questioning whether there even are 140 items of "Private Health Information" on the Systems Diagrams. For any journalists racing to cover this, I'd like to start pointing out the various tricks used in the lawsuit. For one thing, Kaiser is using one of my former managers as their "expert" on PHI (Dr. Fury in the affadavit list) - presumably either to intimidate me or to call attention to my "disgruntled employee" status in order to distract the court from the matter at hand and/or smear my character. By the way, the DMHC lawyer used the same tactic: and I'm not restrained from talking about that because that occured in the public part of the meeting with the DMHC.

4. In speaking of easily-duped journalists, I still haven't heard from FAIR or any of the other mediawatch organizations I contacted in regard to NBC resorting to fiction to tell the most sensational story. Since several attorneys told me that the press response (which the above-mentioned DMHC egged on) made it difficult for them to help me, I hope this matter will eventually be investigated by someone. NBC needs to realize the real damage that can be done by journalism malpractice.

5. I did get a note that the Bar Association is investigating my concerns about how I was treated by Peter Grant, the organizer of the HIPAA Summit.

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The only good thing going on right now is that I'm contributing my story to a guy who is writing about "whisper campaigns". If anyone else out there is writing a book on a pertinent topic, I'm more than willing to help for free. At the minute, it's the only way I know of to respond to all those Kaiser-generated stories still floating around.