Hillary Clinton's health is an issue, her own policies and actions make it one.
Dishonesty: The speculation about Hillary Clinton's health was expected--After all she is cloaked in dishonesty from the largest to the smallest arenas from the circulating lies unrelated to her health, the proven lies unrelated to her health and for those of us who watched her performance on Matt Lauer's Military Forum, her inability to be honest in terms of a simple agreement to do a single thing for a half-hour:
Lauer: To the best of your ability tonight, can we talk about your qualities and your qualifications to be commander-in-chief and not use this as an opportunity to attack Mr. Trump, all right?
Clinton: I think that’s an exactly right way to proceed.
Yet in the less than half-hour discussion, Hillary Clinton did just that three times:
"Now, my opponent was for the war in Iraq. He says he wasn’t. You can go back and look at the record."
"With respect to Libya, again, there’s no difference between my opponent and myself. He’s on record extensively supporting intervention in Libya…"
"And I do think there is an agenda out there, supported by my opponent…"
The downside of being untrustworthy is you're not trusted, so naturally, when Hillary Clinton collapsed, there were questions as to what happened.
Clinton, Citizen Privacy and The NSA: In 2014 with arguments about the intrusive monitoring performed by the NSA, "Clinton also emphasized the Federal Government does not use personal data for commercial purposes -- insisting other governments do," http://www.zdnet.com/article/hillary-clinton-talks-nsa-and-privacy-data-security-tech-jobs-in-san-francisco/.
Clinton has remained mute on the invasions of US citizen privacy in terms of any meaningful commitment to citizen privacy as noted in THE ATLANTIC, in 2015: "She served in the United States Senate from 2001 to 2009. She cast votes that enabled the very NSA spying that many now regard as a betrayal. And she knew all about what the NSA wasn't telling the public," http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/hillary-clintons-evasive-position-on-nsa-spying/386024/.
Clinton on Privacy and Mental Health: Hillary Clinton is all about eroding privacy in healthcare, including, "The Early Psychosis Intervention Network (EPINET) is a platform at the National Institute of Mental Health, which serves as a centralized source of information, data, and best practices to providers and clinicians who treat psychosis. Hillary will support EPINET and other efforts like it that enable mental health practitioners to share information," https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/08/29/hillary-clintons-comprehensive-agenda-on-mental-health/. Clinton joins this invasion of privacy with a proposal to link the now shared mental health records with the federal government to achieve "…closing the loopholes that allow people suffering from severe mental illness to purchase and own guns," https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/gun-violence-prevention/.
Clinton and Privacy and Physical Health: Obamacare's Electronic Health Records: Touting technology, Obamacare pays physician offices for implementing electronic health records. Yet our health records have been the subject of their own unique black-market hacking in numbers that should alarm any patient with 720 data breaches last year leaving "…more than 193 million personal records open to fraud and identity theft," http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/7-largest-data-breaches-2015.
And while many argue that electronic health records with their sacrifice of privacy and opportunity for breach COULD improve healthcare, there is limited evidence that they do improve healthcare.
"Although EHR-related errors, and their actual and potential impact on the quality and usefulness of EHR documentation, quality of care, and patient safety, have been documented for years, much work still needs to be done to measure the occurrence of these errors, determine the causes, and implement solutions. Currently there are no regulatory requirements to evaluate EHR system efficacy and safety. EHR certification does not guarantee that EHRs will be implemented and that they will work as planned. Policies, usability principles, and best practices for proper EHR system use have not been widely and consistently adopted. There is no sense of shared accountability between system developers and users for product functioning. Adverse outcomes associated with EHRs are not being systematically and consistently tracked," http://perspectives.ahima.org/impact-of-electronic-health-record-systems-on-information-integrity-quality-and-safety-implications/#.
And, in 2016, three years later: "The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association report found that the rate of inaccurate documentation was significantly higher in the EHRs compared to the paper charts: 24.4 percent versus 4.4 percent," AMIA study shows higher error rates in EHR records, Chris Nerney, http://www.hiewatch.com/news/amia-study-shows-higher-error-rates-ehr-records.
Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US (https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/), yet the CDC doesn't even address the threat.
Clinton and Privacy and Prevention: And then there's the shift of focus from treating people with illness to prevention that is often used to PENALIZE consumers rather than help them regain lost health. How else would you explain the "wellness" models designed to enable insurers to "price their products" that permit individuals to be charged a surcharge if they don't want to share their personal medical history at an employment site?
"Employee Wellness Programs Not So Voluntary Anymore, Take a blood test or lose your health coverage," http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-15/employee-wellness-programs-not-so-voluntary-anymore.
Yes, Hillary Clinton's health is up for scrutiny based on her own record of dishonesty and the environment in which we live today that sacrifices personal privacy with claims of needed information that is often used against us. This is Hillary Clinton's consistent track record and the American people should provide her with no more respect of her privacy than we receive under her leadership.
