Letting the sun shine on government is good for the people's health

Few people would object to a law that would give the Ohio Health Department the power to shield a person's "protected health information" from public view.
It sounds absolutely reassuring that the health department would be able to keep from prying eyes personal information about an individual's health that may come to be part of its files.
A casual reading of substitute House Bill 6 that is making its way through the General Assembly would cause the layman to believe that the state's lawmakers are simply responding to the privacy concerns of their constituents.
As is so often the case, however, the devil is in the details, and in this case the detail is the use of the word person rather than individual in the legislation. That's because Ohio law recognizes a corporation as a person.
Broad implications
If this bill were to become law, the Ohio Health Department could refuse to release information about its investigation into a that plant was emitting toxic fumes. A rash of food poisoning at a particular restaurant. Or a giant poultry farm that was fouling the air, land and water table.
This law is a textbook example of how bureaucrats seize on an opportunity to give themselves a greater ability to function in secret, to keep information from the public even if it is important, perhaps vital, to their well-being.
In this case, the bill was requested by the health department primarily so it could respond to a new and legitimate threat, that of bioterrorism,
But in the process of defining the department's power to monitor bioterrorism threats and conduct investigations, bureaucrats are trying to amend and dilute Ohio's public records law as it relates to routine health department activities.
In addition to using person rather than individual in strategic locations, the law would allow the director of health to keep from public view virtually anything he or she wanted to shield under the guise of an on-going investigation. Further, it would give the director the power to gag people inside and outside the department from discussing what they know.
It is far too broad a power to give one government official. It would overturn a presumption toward openness that extends back a century and legal requirements for open records that have been established in Ohio for decades.
Legislative duty
For the department to seek to wrap much of what it does in a cloak of secrecy by playing on the public's fear of bioterrorism is despicable. The state's elected legislators should not allow it to happen.
The bill has passed the House, quite possibly without some of the members who voted for it recognizing the potential scope of its changes to the state's public records law.
It now comes before the Senate Finance Committee for a hearing Tuesday, and the committee has an opportunity to restore balance to the law.
Every bureaucrat in the world wants to be able to go about his business with a minimum of interference from the press or public interest groups or reformers. It is the duty of legislators, the elected representatives of the citizenry, to require state employees to keep their doors as open as is possible.
If, for instance, the trauma center in a community were ill-equipped to respond to emergency situations, it's understandable that the trauma center would not want that information publicized. The easiest way to keep such embarrassing information from the public is to claim that releasing it would encourage a terrorist. That's a red herring. The best way to protect the public is to acknowledge that the trauma center is deficient. Public pressure will do more than secrecy to get the deficiencies corrected, and everyone will be better served.
In almost every way, the public is best protected when its right to know is preserved. An uniformed public is in greatest danger.
That was overlooked in the House. Let's hope it is seen in the Senate.