Partisanship has taken another turn in Harrisburg in the form of House Bill 1893 which passed the Pennsylvania House on Oct. 4th along a party line vote. HB 1893 has now moved to the Pennsylvania Senate for consideration.
This controversial bill, sponsored by Bucks County Republican Representative Craig Staats, amends the Disease Prevention and Control Law of 1955 in order to remove the Wolf Administration’s ability to classify state records data related to disease outbreaks and the state’s response to disease outbreaks as confidential. Currently these records are not generally open to the public unless released by the state health department. HB 1893 would make state and local department of health data open to the public under Pennsylavnia’s Right to Know Law of 2008.
Republicans have painted the bill as a means of encouraging public accountability, while Democrats claim that information the bill seeks to release is already widely available to the public. Democrats claim the bill is just another attempt by the Republican controlled legislature to cement Republican legislative control over the governor’s office.
The once little-known 1955 statute became extremely important almost overnight after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The Wolf Administration almost immediately began to use the confidentiality clause in the 1955 law to shield them from potential criticism in their handling of the pandemic case numbers and deaths in nursing homes. Health department data used in support of the actions and decisions taken by the Wolf administration in response to COVID-19 is still a pretty tightly kept secret at the state according to Spotlight PA, a non-partisan news outlet.
Republican lawmakers claim they want to end what they perceive as Wolf’s surreptitious behavior by amending the DPCA of 1955 to make most state health data available to the general public. According to the Philly Voice, this means that everything from vaccination rates by school district to infection rates by school district and everything else covered under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Laws would be subject to complete and total public exposure.
Democrats have countered by saying that this is simply the latest step in a Republican plan to undermine the power of the governor’s office for partisan gain. Similar to the way the Republican dominated legislature approached the mask mandate issue as a matter of individual choice over public health, Democrats are claiming that Republicans are attempting to weaken the role and reputation of the governor’s office by politicizing information that the administration already makes available through the state website health.pa.gov.
With state elections only a little over a year away, Democrats argue that Republicans are trying to build momentum to flip the governorship by using certain aspects of the Wolf Administration’s pandemic response as a cudgel, while simultaneously downplaying the vaccination progress the Wolf Administration has made. The Wolf Administration consistently updates most of the information that would be subject to the Right to Know Law if the DCPA of 1955 were amended under HB 1893. According to the non-partisan news outlet Capital-Star, most of the major privacy concerns associated with the revision of the DPCA of 1955, such as the publicization of specific medical records for individuals, are exempt from HB 1893 on both the state and federal levels.
Public accountability is extremely important, and although the Wolf Administration has responded to the pandemic relatively well, it could put the negative rumors associated with how it handled the pandemic to rest by releasing all of the health data and increasing the transparency of the administration’s response to the pandemic.
