The inmates are still running the asylum.

In a legal opinion issued a week ago, did Deputy Attorney General Cynthia Pyzel:

a) Refuse to support the rights of Nevada citizens to be fully informed about the workings of our child welfare bureaucracy?

b) Split hairs over marginally conflicting state and federal laws to find a way to shield the bureaucrats from accountability to the taxpayers?

c) Too narrowly interpret the language of the privacy rule under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act?

d) All of the above?

Of course, the answer is "d."

The question asked of the AG's office was: "What information may be publicly released by an agency that provides child welfare services in the event of a child fatality or a near fatality caused by abuse or neglect?"

Pyzel's answer was: Darned near nothing. No names, no birthdays, no date of death.

Somehow she waved her magic legal lexicon and redefined the state's Division of Child and Family Services as a health care provider.

But two years ago the Texas attorney general came out with an opposite opinion, correctly opining that the HIPAA rules apply only to health plans, health care clearing houses and health care providers -- basically insurers, doctors, nurses, ambulance personnel and hospitals. Not welfare bureaucrats.

But even HIPAA allows those covered by the privacy rules to release pertinent information to police and other public agencies. Then, the Texas AG concluded, the information is subject to state public records law.

The Nevada opinion was issued in spite of the fact the state received a letter from the regional administrator of the federal Administration for Children and Families spelling out what information could be required to be filed and potentially disclosed to the public. This included the name, date of birth, date of death, cause of death, as well as investigation, services, referrals and reasons for closing cases.

But that wasn't good enough. Pyzel concluded, "Not withstanding the letter ... I can find no legal authority that the child welfare system must release the name or the birth date or date of death of a child who dies or who is a near fatality due to abuse or neglect."

The reason such information should be public is to keep the public informed not just about neglected or abused children, but also about whether the welfare and social workers are doing their jobs adequately.

If police on Tuesday find a 2-year-old starved to death and lying in rotting garbage, when a social worker's time card shows he was in the home on Monday, that is something the public needs to know. But Pyzel rules that this is none of your business.

To her credit, Assembly Majority Leader Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, is pushing legislation to require social services agencies in Nevada to make as much information as legally possible available to the public.

• Speaking of things that are none of your business:

State Sen. and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beers made a futile bid this past week to open up meetings of a legislative panel studying public education funding adequacy.

But the legislative counsel quickly opined that meeting was not subject to the open meeting law, and the chair of the committee, Assemblywoman Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, quibbled that because the first meeting was taking place the next day it would not be possible to comply with the open meeting law's three-day notice requirements.

Both points are extraneous. The Legislature, like most such lawmaking bodies, has always exempted itself from the laws it forces on everyone else.

The point should be that transparency is the best policy when addressing such an important topic, if the public is ever going to give the study results any credulity. But, since the paid consultant is meeting in secret with mostly educrats, it is not too difficult to guess what the recommendations will be: More money now and lots of it.

It won't be worth the boilerplate it is written on.

Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Review-Journal, writes a column on the role of free speech and press. He may be reached at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@ reviewjournal.com.