Maine has very strict laws regarding the privacy of hospital patients (and medical privacy in general), so I’m surprised any information was released about the Chief Justice.
Most hospitals ask you how much information they want released. Without a release, the national HPPA laws prevent the hospitals from even identifing that the patient is there.
This happened with a local mayor who entered one hospital and had to go to another one in town. Hospital A did not perform heart surgery. Hospital B did. The decision was made to transfer the Mayor from A to B because it made sense not to do a test that might result in an immediate need for survery.
Unfortunately, the Mayor never signed off on Hospital A’s information sheet, so the local newspaper made it sound like he did not have “faith” in Hospital A or they were not “qualified” to perform the operation. It made A look really bad. And the hospital was helpless to say a word about it. Finally, after all the testing was done the mayor had a press conference to straighten things out.
The media people at Hospital A were frustrated beyond belief.