What do Farrah Fawcett, Tom Cruise and Paula Abdul have in common?  According to this report, their medical information was sold by nurses and orderlies of UCLA Medical Center to The National Enquirer.  Rush & Molloy , gossip columnists for the New York Daily News, report:

Former UCLA Medical Center staffer Lawanda Jackson was indicted on April 9 after allegedly leaking private info about Fawcett, Maria Shriver and 60 other patients. Now vets at the ‘bloids are wondering how long it will be before other health professionals and reporters are drawn into the investigation.

Staffers at L.A. hospitals favored by celebs have been on the payroll of the supermarket weeklies for years, based on transcripts we’ve obtained of taped conversations among dirt-diggers at Globe magazine.

Privacy is a pervasive issue in the law.  HIPAA was supposed to protect medial privacy.  It doesn’t.  It’s another grocery clerk solution, a form to be checked that is substantively ignored. 

Want proof?  Go to the hospital emergency room and wait for your name to be called on the loudspeaker.  What business do they have disclosing the fact that you are there, seeking medical attention, to a roomful of strangers?  Want more proof?  Ask Farrah.

We are asked to give up personal information to such a wide variety of entities, from medical to banking to pharmaceutical to the newspaper delivery person.  They give us a form and we dutifully fill it out, providing a wealth of personal information, much of which has absolutely no bearing on the purpose of engagement, but will come in quite handy if they want to collect their fees later.  Our entire life is floating around in files under the control of other people.

Most businesses have a “privacy statement” assuring us that they won’t disclose our personal information.  Officially, that’s largely accurate, except when a cop asks in which case they collapse on the floor and hand over everything they’ve got. 

In the meantime, consider who has access to all this information.  You may well trust your physician, but do you trust his nurse?  His receptionist?  The teenagers who work in the medical suite after school? 

The indictment of Lawanda Jackson is arguably a start in the stream of deterrence that might keep others in check.  But the story is that this had been going on for years, with plenty of sources happy to provide titillating personal information.  One person has been indicted.  Are the others shaking in their scrubs?  Not likely.

The fact that private information is readily accessible to anyone at UCLA Medical Center who bothered to look reduces HIPAA and proclamations of privacy to a joke.  Once Farrah’s personal information is revealed, there’s no way to unreveal it.  No indictment will restore her privacy.

And what of the National Enquirer, whether it seduced hospital employees to provide the information or merely accepted it on a silver platter? 

A spokesman for American Media Inc., which bought The Globe in 2000, said the legality of the dealings before then “are not our responsibility.” The rep declined to comment on the current Enquirer case.

Don’t blame them for being at the bottom of the journalistic barrel.  They make no pretense otherwise, and plenty of people buy these tabloids at the checkout counter.  But bear in mind that the Enquirer never promised to vouchsafe anyone’s privacy.  They may be sick, disgusting scum, but at least they are true to their purpose. 

For all the trees that have died so that hospitals can pass out their HIPAA policies to patients, nothing has been done internally to safeguard patient privacy.  And that’s hospitals, one of the few places where you can identify the source of illegal disclosures. 

Consider the hundreds of other entities that have our personal information in their computers, multiplied by the number of individuals who can access that information at will.  Do you trust them?  It’s time to take personal privacy seriously, both in our giving out unnecessary personal information and their assuring our privacy.