I have a friend who is mad as hell at Joe Biden right now.
There’s a job waiting for him overseas. He’s fully vaccinated. But he can’t prove it to his new employer’s satisfaction. Even if the host country lets him in, he’ll have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, at great expense, before he can start work.
How can this be, he asks? Why hasn’t the President mandated vaccine passports?
We all overestimate what a President can do. The media treats him as magic, the final authority, the one person responsible for everything.
But the President’s powers are severely circumscribed. Especially in this case.
There is no national medical database. There’s no federal control over health insurance. Under the McCarran-Ferguson Act , passed in 1945, health insurance is a state function. Even the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act held that states didn’t have to take its Medicaid expansion. Many still don’t.
But even the states don’t have centralized health care databases. Until the ACA was passed, many didn’t even have health care records computerized. It was only through the application of “sweet, sweet stimulus cash,” as I called it, in the 2009 Recovery Act, that we got the carrots-and-sticks necessary to collect electronic health records. Those records are still subject to control under HIPAA. The holders of vaccination records can’t give them to anyone, not even the government, without specific approval from patients.
Health records are privatized. They’re held by hospitals and health insurers. There’s no way to share them, even on a statewide level. All we can do is collect statistics. Statistics don’t identify people.
That’s why my friend only got a hand-written card when he was vaccinated. Civilized countries, which have central control over their health care and payment systems, can prove who is and who isn’t vaccinated. We can’t.
This is not Joe Biden’s fault. But the media won’t say that. We blame the President, personally, for everything that is wrong in the world. If people refuse vaccinations, that’s his fault. When economic confidence falls because people are refusing vaccines, that’s his fault. If his predecessor abandoned Afghanistan, that’s his fault. If fires threaten Lake Tahoe, that’s his fault. If the New Orleans electric grid fails because of a hurricane, that’s his fault too.
Every reporter and pundit knows how ridiculous this is. But that doesn’t stop them from reporting it that way. Why? For the same reason my friend can’t get a vaccine card. Journalism, like health care, is controlled by private businesses, each with its own agenda, each out for itself.
Only the President can call people to the public interest, we’re told. But we don’t have to respond.
