Earlier this year, a state-run program advertised an opportunity for residents to apply for affordable universal health care. They made it clear that everyone may not be eligible, but the program would conduct a type of lottery for participants.
As it turned out, it was just a way for a local university to accummulate names and phone numbers for surveys and studies.
Is this a flagrant violation of our privacy, an abuse of state-run agencies? The promise of health care when there was no such program is fraudulent.
The honest and right thing would have been to advertise that, if you apply, you may not become a participant of the program, but your information will most definitely be used to conduct these studies and surveys, for solicitation. The choice is yours. Apply and get health care, or not, and get solicited either way.
Bells would have gone off and most people are aware enough these days to know better. It still should have been a personal choice.
To expose the culprits would require an investigative process that the average person does not have time for. But something needs to be done. These growing assaults are not just out of line, they are crossing the line.
Here’s a call to the real investigative journalists out there. If they do their jobs, we can start to eliminate these kinds of offenses. People are going too far with being deceptive and intrusive. They are violating our Constitution. Fraud, Abuse, and Invasion of Privacy are crimes.