And So It Begins!

The first lawsuit over telemedicine was just initiated by Louisiana...

N.Y. doctor charged with prescribing abortion pills to Louisiana girl
A New York doctor was indicted Friday for prescribing pills that ended a Louisiana girl’s pregnancy — seemingly the first abortion doctor criminally charged since Roe v. Wade was abolished.
The Washington Post
By Jonathan Edwards
January 31, 2025

A New York doctor was criminally indicted Friday for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a girl in Louisiana in what appears to be the first time an abortion provider has been prosecuted since Roe v. Wade was overturned nearly three years ago. The case sets up one of the first major legal challenges to the “shield laws” enacted by some Democratic-led states to protect doctors providing abortion access in the wake of the Supreme Court ending the constitutional right to an abortion.

Grand jurors in West Baton Rouge parish indicted Margaret Carpenter, 55, with effecting a criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs, court records show. They also indicted Carpenter’s company, Nightingale Medical. She faces one to five years in prison and a $5,000 to $50,000 fine if convicted of violating a 2022 Louisiana law that bans abortion.

Tony Clayton, the district attorney who represents West Baton Rouge parish, said Carpenter prescribed abortion medication to a girl under the age of 18 in April. The girl’s mother, whom The Washington Post is not naming to protect her daughter’s identity, was also charged with carrying out a criminal abortion. Clayton declined to give the girl’s age.

This case is a trailblazer, the first of a kind indictment. The first questions that pops to mind is, can Louisiana prosecute a doctor who was physically in New York when prescribing abortion medication? Then there is the question is in New York there is a shield laws protecting abortion providers that is in conflict with the Louisiana's strict abortion ban, and then the doctor was practicing legally in their home state via telehealth what state laws applies?

Two abortion medication experts said Carpenter’s case was the first of a doctor being criminally charged with prescribing pills to an out-of-state patient who then went through with their abortion. Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school who studies abortion medication and interjurisdictional abortion conflicts, said she wasn’t surprised but “disheartened” by Carpenter’s prosecution.

The governor said that,

On Friday afternoon, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Carpenter’s prosecution is exactly the scenario she and other lawmakers feared when passing the law, and that she planned to use it to refuse any requests to extradite Carpenter.

“I will never under any circumstances turn this doctor over to the state of Louisiana,” she said in an Instagram video.

There is a lot more to this that abortions and trans healthcare, in many parts of the U.S. the only healthcare that they have is via telehealth. If the ruling is that doctors need to be licensed in states that they practice medicine would create a nightmare! It would require a doctor to licensed in all fifty states.

Suppose a cancer doctor at Yale was consulting with a doctor at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center in Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic doctor would have to licenses in all 50 states. Its outcome could have broader implications for telehealth practices across various medical specialties around the U.S.

 

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And so it begins... the purges! A non-government person has access to government databases including the Social Security and Medicare databases!

Exclusive: Musk aides lock Office of Personnel Management workers out of computer systems
Reuters

By Tim Reid
February 1, 2025

 

 

Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.

Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.

The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.

There are laws governing who can access government databases and Musk isn't one of them. The LA Times reports that,

The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, on Friday sent a letter to Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expressing concern that “officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs.”

Hey, breaking the law never bothered Trump & Company. The New Times writes that...

The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.

The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.

The databases also contain our records of name and gender changes in the Social Security and Medicare databases!

And so the purges begin!