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IP: [FP] Congress's Secret Plans to Get Our Medical Records
From: "ScanThisNews" <[email protected]>
Subject: IP: [FP] Congress's Secret Plans to Get Our Medical Records
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 06:47:05 -0500
To: [email protected]
Congress's Secret Plans to Get Our Medical Records
http://www.eagleforum.org/column/1998/aug98/98-08-19.html
August 19, 1998
Americans were outraged to learn about the Federal Government's plans to
assign a personal identification number to every medical patient. But
Congress nevertheless passed H.R. 4250, the so-called Patient Protection
Act, which allows anyone who maintains your personal medical records to
gather, exchange and distribute them.
The only condition on distribution is that the information be used for
"health care operations," which is a vague and meaningless limitation that
does not even exclude marketing. Even worse, H.R. 4250 preempts state laws
that currently protect patients from unauthorized distribution of their
medical records.
While the sponsors of H.R. 4250 claim that they did not intend for the
information to be circulated for "just anything," their spokesman confirmed
that personal medical records would be used for future programs concerning
health quality and disease management.
When the Kennedy-Kassebaum law was passed in 1996, we were told it was to
improve access to health insurance. The law became explosively controversial
last month when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began to
implement the Kennedy-Kassebaum "unique health care identifiers" so that
government can electronically tag, track and monitor every citizen's
personal medical records.
After this news broke on July 18, embarrassed Congressmen inserted a line in
H.R. 4250, which passed July 24, ordering HHS not to promulgate "a final
standard" without Congressional authorization. That language is a total
phony; it doesn't prevent HHS from issuing proposed or interim standards
(which will become de facto standards) or from collecting medical data.
So much money is involved in accessing and controlling personal information
that the Washington lobbyists are moving rapidly to lock in the
extraordinary powers conferred by the Kennedy-Kassebaum law. That explains
these sneaky eleventh-hour inserts in pending legislation.
On August 4, the House passed yet another bill to protect the gathering of
personal information on private citizens. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there
they go again.
Just before passing H.R. 2281, a bill about copyrights on the Internet, the
House quietly attached a separate and dangerous bill deceptively entitled
the "Collections of Information Antipiracy Act."
No one, of course, is in favor of "piracy," but the impact of this bill goes
far beyond any reasonable definition of piracy. By the legerdemain of
inserting it in another bill, it will go straight to a House-Senate
conference committee under a procedure designed to avoid debate or
amendments in the Senate.
This Collections of Information bill (now part of H.R. 2281), in effect,
creates a new federal property right to own, manage and control personal
information about you, including your name, address, telephone number,
medical records, and "any other intangible material capable of being
collected and organized in a systematic way." This new property right
provides a powerful incentive for corporations to build nationwide databases
of the personal medical information envisioned by the Kennedy-Kassebaum law
and the Patient Protection bill.
Under the Collections of Information bill, any information about you can be
owned and controlled by others under protection of Federal law. Your medical
chart detailing your visits to your doctor, for example, would suddenly
become the federally protected property of other persons or corporations,
and their rights (not your rights) would be protected by Federal police
power.
This bill will encourage health care corporations to assign a unique
national health identifier to each patient. The government can then simply
agree to use a privately-assigned national identifier, and Clinton's
longtime goal of government control of health care will be achieved.
This bill creates a new federal crime that penalizes a first offense by a
fine of up to $250,000 or imprisonment for up to 5 years, or both, for
interfering with this new property right. It even authorizes Federal judges
to order seizure of property before a finding of wrongdoing.
H.R. 2281 grants these new Federal rights only to private databases, and
pretends to exclude the government's own efforts to collect information
about citizens. But a loophole in the bill permits private firms to share
their Federally protected data with the government so long as the
information is not collected under a specific government agency or license
agreement.
This loophole will encourage corporations, foundations, Washington insiders
and political donors, to build massive databases of citizens' medical and
other personal records, and then share that data with the government. And,
under the House-passed bill cynically called the Patient Protection Act,
patients would be unable to invoke state privacy laws to protect their
personal records.
Meanwhile, in another aspect of the Federal takeover of all Americans'
health care, the Centers for Disease Control is aggressively building a
national database of all children's medical records through the ruse of
tracking immunizations.
Tell your Congressman and Senators you won't vote for them in the upcoming
elections unless they immediately stop all Federal plans to track and
monitor our health or immunization records.
Phyllis Schlafly column 8-19-98
[thanks to jim groom for finding this piece]
[message forwarded by]
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