Medical Privacy Coalition
The Medical Privacy Coalition (MPC) is dedicated to upholding the long-standing and fundamental confidentiality right of individuals to decide when and to whom their personal health information is disclosed. Patient control over the flow of their personal health information is essential for maintaining patients' confidential relationships with doctors and other health providers, and for the delivery of quality health care.
To accomplish its mission, the MPC seeks to restore, maintain, and improve individuals' right to give their informed consent before their personal health information is shared with others, including for purposes related to health-care treatment, payment and health-care operations. The MPC is seeking to obtain administrative, legislative and/or judicial action to ensure that individuals' consent is obtained prior to the release of their personal health information.
Hands-Off Our Runny Noses
By Kerri Houston
CNSNews.com Commentary
March 28, 2005
Good intentions by politicians have been known to inflict collateral damage on innocent bystanders as legislative overreach often causes problems for taxpayers, consumers or other subgroups of the citizenry.
Responding to a recent increase in methamphetamine use and production, the currently elected would like to legislate criminals out of business by passing laws that place common cold remedies out of the reach of non-criminal consumers.
Legislators, both state and federal, are fishing for the guilty in a sea of the innocent.
Opposing Plans to Make Government-Directed
Health Care Permanent Law In Minnesota
- Violate Privacy Rights: Government must not build statewide electronic medical record systems to facilitate government tracking and reporting of patient care—and physician adherence to government-approved treatment protocols. Patients have a right to keep their private medical records free from government inspection, assessment, or collection.
TAKE ACTION NOW: http://www.cchconline.org/petition_form.php
The NHIN has been proposed by data collectors, data miners, data profiteers, and public and private purveyors of health surveillance and statistically-devised rationing of care. These include government agencies, health plans, disease management companies, researchers, and the more than 200 members of WEDI, the Working Group on Electronic Data Interchange.
Speeding on the Information Superhighway Will Result in Medical Pile-Up
Doctors Urge Congress to ‘Proceed with Caution’ Before Mandating
National Information Infrastructure
Doctors in private practice and small facilities will face enormous, unsupportable costs, and patients will face decreased access to care if Congress insists on fast tracking a National Health Information Infrastructure, according to testimony submitted to Congress today by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).
Calling for restraint in passing regulations that would place a further burden on doctors, Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director of AAPS, said that the only parties who might benefit federal government, certain third-party providers, and the lawyers.
And further, hasty adoption of still-changing, relatively new information technology actually threatens to result in higher long-term costs by marrying medicine to technology that might quickly become obsolete.
Hearing on Health Care Information Technology
Statement of :
Jane M. Orient, M.D.Executive Director,
Association of American Physicians & Surgeons
Submitted to:
House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Health
July 27, 2005
Madame Chairman and Members of the Committee:
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons was founded in 1943 to preserve private medicine. We represent thousands of physicians in all specialties nationwide, and the millions of patients that they serve. I am the executive director, and a practicing internist in Tucson, Arizona.
Nine years ago, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, also known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). It was the end product of three and a half contentious years of White House and Congressional horse-trading. These efforts resulted in new laws that were supposed to make health insurance easier to purchase, with the capability to follow a worker from one job to another, with policies more responsive to the needs of patients, doctors and hospitals. It was also supposed to help 38 million Americans obtain health insurance.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which is based in Arizona, is one of the few physician membership groups to speak out against the law.
Michael Ostrolenk, spokesman for the organization, said the Patriot Act requires a judge to sign a federal agent's request for information, but the agent doesn't have to explain what the information is for and the judge can't really ask, he said. Ostrolenk said that jeopardizes patient-doctor confidentiality, but he doubts many citizens know anything about the possible implications of the law for their own private files.
Congress could vote soon to pass H.R. 4157, deceptively titled the “Health Information Technology Promotion Act.” A somewhat different Senate version, S. 1418 (“Wired for Health Care” has already passed, lead by sponsors Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.
In one of the worst examples ever of the federal government creating a problem, purporting to solve the problem and then making it much worse, the Congress and the Bush administration have made it all but impossible for you to maintain the confidentiality of your most personal information.
The Assault on Freedom, Federalism, and Privacy
The "right to privacy" is oft on the lips of federal lawmakers. They usually mean abortion, but most other people mean something more basic protection against snooping.
There always have been busybody neighbors, dumpster-diving thieves, and intrusive journalists, but protecting personal privacy has become even more important in the computer age. Threats come from all quarters. The most obvious known dangers result from crooks who go "phishing" for personal financial information online or who break into personal computers or corporate intranet systems. However, sometimes the gravest threat to privacy and our liberties comes not from thieves but from government officials who claimed that their "need to know" trumps the individual right to be left alone.
“This is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Peel said. “Insurer-provided electronic personal health records held in a data bank that the insurers control will be used primarily to benefit insurers, not patients.”
"I feel like now I have no privacy," Ms. Galvin says. "My most private thoughts, my personal tragedies, secrets about other people, are mere data of a transaction, like a grocery receipt." Ms. Galvin has sued Stanford Hospital and her insurer in California state court for, among other things, violating state medical-privacy laws.
KAI RYSSDAL: You're at the doctor's office. Filling out some form or another. You come to the question about your last tetanus shot. When was it? And you either leave the question blank or you fudge it. Because, seriously, who remembers that kind of thing?
Today five of this country's biggest companies announced a plan to get rid of the guesswork. They're going to give employees access to their health records electronically. It should reduce medical errors and avoid unneceesary care. Oh, and it'll save the companies money, too.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/12/06/PM200612066.html
... Oppose the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005 (NASPER). The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005 is an attempt by the Federal government to 'deal' with so-called doctor shopping. This bill gives states grant money to create scheduled drug-tracking databases. As a condition of obtaining federal funding, the bill requires the states to establish programs requiring pharmacists to report the "name, address, and telephone number" of any individual who receives any controlled substance, as well as information on the prescribing doctor and the amount and type of prescription....
As reported in the New York Times on July 8, 2005, potentially 500,000 patients’ information would be accessed without patient consent and such access would include the patient’s name, lab results as well as the name of his or her physician. Such broad access and unauthorized contact with the treating physician is unprecedented and should not be done without strong justification in view of such concerns as patient privacy and the rights afforded to each citizen under the Constitution.
Security makes little difference because every identifiable prescription in the country is data mined and sold daily. Nobody needs to break into pharmacies to steal our prescriptions; they are for sale.
The Bush administration has no clear strategy to protect the privacy of patients as it promotes the use of electronic medical records throughout the nation’s health care system, federal investigators say in a new report.
“Privacy is the biggest concern,” Serkes said. “I keep hearing that privacy and consent laws are barriers to implementation. Our concern is that this will lead to a push to dumb down privacy and consent laws and this raises red flags for us.”
“The idea that the federal government can comb through the medical records of Americans and label them “mentally defective” is truly chilling,” said Liberty Coalition second amendment policy expert Mike Stollenwerk. “Such labeling is a gross violation of privacy rights and is ripe with potential for abuse.”
a bill to greatly expand federal lists of “mentally defective” people. H.R. 297 will result in a large scale unwarranted invasion of the personal privacy of millions of Americans, and an unjustified lifetime deprivation of their civil rights.
The way Peel tells it, her patients now include every U.S. patient, whose medical privacy is being unethically and even illegally invaded by healthcare’s paparazzi—the multibillion-dollar medical data-mining industry—and the pharmaceutical and insurance companies the data-miners serve. She also believes federal officials are hell-bent on promoting healthcare IT, but aren’t listening to patients' concerns that their most intimate information, once digitized, could be lost, stolen or stored and held against them.
found that 35 percent of Fortune 500 companies admit to seeking and using private medical records to make hiring and promotion decisions. Other companies, including insurance and drug companies, data-mine such information for marketing purposes.
The Tipping Point for Health IT is not about funding or even bureaucracy: it’s about PATIENTS trusting that their most personal information will be protected.
But when state police start entering pharmacies to get full prescribing
records of anyone taking a Schedule II controlled substance like
Oxycontin-- as the
Green Mountain Daily blog [hat tip to
Daily Kos]
Posted January 7th, 2008 by Michael D Ostrolenk
Liberty Coalition would like to thank Dr. Peel for being our first guest blogger in 2008.
“We’ve put together a number of ways you can both control your private health records from the ground up and fight for the privacy of your health records from the top down,” said Patient Privacy Rights’ Executive Director, Ashley Katz. “And we’re just getting started.” The toolkit will be updated every few months as needed.
