'Access Denied'

The waiting room was brightly lit with cheery wall motifs, decorations and knickknacks on the tables to relax patients awaiting their consultations with doctors specializing in life-limiting illnesses.  Before technology-phobic patients could close the door behind them upon arrival, a receptionist with a hard-copy appointment log on her desk, directed them to the digitalized check-in-device a few feet away. 

Information becomes more reliable when it is duplicated unnecessarily.

A moment later, patients received text messages confirming their arrival had been noted. The sender was seated a few feet away and could have whispered the news, but saving her breath enabled her to multitask more efficiently, which was a core value of management.

Were this the doctors' offices of most corporatized hospitals, the CEO'S portrait would be prominently displayed, but this facility belonged to Catholic Health Long Island. Instead, there was a photo of Pope Leo XIV, with a serene and wise countenance that radiated empathy. 

It persuasively suggested a more spiritual and materialist mission. That intimation was short-lived.

Judging from their insurance-acceptance policy, they were guided less by divine creation than by the profane hand of wealth creation. Business decisions work in mysterious ways.

Since mid-May, the hospitals and physicians of Catholic Health Long Island have refused to accept the Healthfirst network for Medicaid, HARP, Child Health Plus, Individual Marketplace and Essential Plan coverage. They claim their efforts to "reach a new agreement that would allow us to remain in network... and support the level of care and service we are committed to providing" were rebuffed.

Ironically, Northwell Health and some other nakedly corporate hospital networks continue to accept the insurance that Catholic Health Long Island rejected. One cannot be faith-based and money-grubbing sharks at the same time. 

Healthfirst ranked top out of 12 statewide Medicaid Managed Care plans in in the New York State Department of Health's Medicaid Qualified Incentive Program. It is a non-profit, with more than 2 million subscribers, most of whom do not meet CHLI's bar to deserve the perks of affluence.

There is translucent evidence of the root of evil being money. There is crystal clear proof that the seductions of prosperity are more deeply rooted.

The cozy relationship between godliness and social-Darwinist economics is jarring and disillusioning.  Sometimes, there can be a compromise between polarities. 

The gulf between conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats is wider than that between the sacred and the secular.

Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) are sponsoring legislation to protect kids from deepfakes and AI-generated material that social media companies, by stealthy algorithms, have devised to addict children with predatory enticements to compulsive, self-destructive behavior. These sites have been accessible to them because no age verification has been required.

That was no oversight; it was designed that way.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is a package of bills that incorporates the No Fakes Act, Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and the APP Store Accountability Act.  According to Politico, the No Fake Act, introduced by Senators Chris Coons (D-Del) and Marsha Blackburn, would "create new protections against AI-enabled replicas and deepfakes, and allow people to sue over the unauthorized use of their likeness."

It's been endorsed by the actors' union SAG-AFTRA and Disney, and even YouTube, Tik-Tok and Open AI.  In the misappropriated and treacherously co-opted name of "free speech" and the First Amendment, it has been opposed by fanatics such as the Center for Democracy and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) condemns KOSA as a "Trojan Horse."

The hardline libertarian sees it as a trick to advance the soldiers of censorship. Most objections to KOSA are polemical and pig-headed, but there is some rational reluctance in the mix.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted that some ambiguous words with flexible definitions and subjective applications, such as "obscene" could block protected groups, such as LGBTQ people, to critical information, and impede entry to sites, such as pro-choice pages.

The fact that these restrictions would not be maliciously exclusionary does not absolve them from their undesirability.

KOSA has been alternately languishing and percolating since it was originally proposed a couple of years ago, when Meta used its influence to spike it after it had been approved by the Senate. Since then, the delay in passing it has been craftily explained but cannot be explained away.

If enacted, it would "let minors delete their account and any associated data, restrict communication from non-minors, disable addictive product features, such as autoplay for videos or platform rewards, and require internet service platforms to default to the highest possible privacy settings for accounts that belong to minors," according to Wikipedia.

Late last June, the House's rendition of KOSA dropped the so-called "duty of care" provision, which would mandate companies to develop platforms within the parameters of child safeguards, hardly a controversial goal, and would also countermand state laws that were less stringent than federal standards, while allowing states to develop more exacting ones.

It is imperative that non-human chatbots identify themselves as such to users.

Also in June, very shortly before the United Kingdom was relieved of the prime ministership of Keir Starmer, he had announced a ban on children using social media, such as Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X, though not What's App, Signal and messaging services.  Such brazen suppression would be rejected like projectile vomit by the American body politic.

KOSA targets not only online platforms, but also video games, streaming services, and messaging applications, and requires parental consent for research when users are under 17 years old. Many high-tech companies have begrudgingly embraced KOSA, though with the sincerity of a professional wrestler's villainous character making an offer of reproachment when snagged against the ropes.

The companies have decided to cut their losses and polish their images. That strategy will doubtless be periodically revisited.

Many months ago, survivors testified to Congress about the internet's deviously hypnotic suggestiveness that killed their teenaged children.

A 16-year-old committed suicide after weeks of TikTok videos that practically advocated it.  A 12-year-old child died after taking a viral video "challenge." A 15-year-old was sadistically manipulated and driven to suicide by sextortion. A 17-year-old was killed by a megadose of fake oxycontin that had been marketed as Percocet.

The abolition of online bullying and doxing is unenforceable and unrealistic. 

Human cruelty and the misapplied tenets of free protections are eternally omnipresent. But sanctions can be tightened, and punishments should be dramatically intensified.

What have the high-tech companies and Catholic Health of Long Island in common? In their respective boardrooms, a single overarching priority was set in their stone-hearted credo: profit over safety, health and peace.