From Debora C. Peek of Patient Privacy Rights in the Wall Street Journal:
… President Barack Obama said that his administration wants every American to have an electronic health record by 2014, and last year’s stimulus bill allocated over $36 billion to build electronic record systems. Meanwhile, the Senate health-care bill just approved by the House of Representatives on Sunday requires certain kinds of research and reporting to be done using electronic health records. …
In 2005, a California Healthcare Foundation poll found that one in eight Americans avoided seeing a regular doctor, asked a doctor to alter a diagnosis, paid privately for a test, or avoided tests altogether due to privacy concerns. …
n the past five years, according to the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 45 million electronic health records were either lost, stolen by insiders (hospital or government-agency employees, health IT vendors, etc.), or hacked from outside.
Thomas Sowell writes:
With politicians now having not only access to our most confidential records, and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters?
Despite whatever “firewalls” or “lockboxes” there may be to shield our medical records from prying political eyes, nothing is as inevitable as leaks in Washington.
Regarding a related Bill in Colorado, HB 1330 (not law yet) Linda Gorman writes:
Naturally the bill directs that the data be securely stored.
Tell that to the 3.4 million Colorado residents who, as the State Auditor’s Office said in May, 2008, have had their unencrypted personal information sent over the Internet and telephone lines on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Tell that to the 1.4 million people who had personal information in Colorado’s State Directory of New Hires, the state’s “centralized, confidential, and secure” repository for new hire data reported by employers in the State of Colorado. Their personal data was exposed in 2006 when a desktop computer was stolen from a state contractor processing child support payments for Colorado’s Department of Human Services.
For more information, check out the Institute for Health Freedom’s resources.
