Everyone wants to maintain the privacy of their health. But when you hold public office and public power (like Mitch McConnell), you have a clear responsibility to sacrifice some of it to keep the public informed. When my husband entered the ICU, he was a Congressman and had announced his re-election bid. Of course we wanted to keep everything private but we authorized the hospital to provide updates to media and provided our own because the people who he represented him and were supporting him had the right to know what was happening. We only stopped doing so once we withdrew his re-election bid and his term in Congress ended. But these DC relics stay in office so long that they see themselves as royalty with obligations to nobody. That Tom Kean's silent disappearance was tolerated for months was absurd, as is the utter lack of information about McConnell.