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December 13, 2016 - A well-meaning bill called "Kevin and Avonte’s Law" passed the House of Representatives on Friday. The bill would allow the government to electronically track patients with learning or mental disabilities. While it is well meaning, the original text of the bill would have given the US Attorney General sweeping powers to monitor virtually any patient without any need for court supervision. And the revised version appears to be completely unnecessary.
Kevin and Avonte’s Law is named for two children who had autism and who wondered away their caregivers. Before they could be found, both boys died in separate drowning incidents.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) introduced his bill, named in their honor, as a means to help find lost patients who suffer from some mental impairment before anything happens to them. His primary focus is on children with autism and adults with Alzheimer's.
If the bill does become law, it would provide funds and resources to use non-invasive tracking technology - such as monitoring bracelets and anklets of the kind used to monitor prisoners - to monitor patients. When a patient with a monitor is reported missing, the government would have the ability to immediately locate them.
There is however concern that the government could be granted too much power by the law. In the original version of the bill, the Attorney General would have had sold discretion to determine whether or not a patient should be monitored. No court supervision would have been required to force a patient into the monitoring program. And the monitoring technology used would have been inserted into patients and couldn't have been removed.
That language has since been dropped, and as it is currently proposed, participation would be completely voluntary. But it is disturbing that anyone would even contemplate an involuntary monitoring program of this type. And it isn't clear to us that this legislation is necessary under any conditions. There are commercially available tracking technologies on the market already that are available to individual patients and their families.
Because of this, we are calling on congress to table this legislation. In our opinion, it is either a well-meaning program that has not been well thought out or it is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars for a program that is unnecessary. Of course, it could be both of these things.
byJim Malmberg
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