HHS Chief to Alter Privacy Rules

HHS Chief to Alter Privacy Rules

NewsMax.com
Friday, March 30, 2001

The Bush administration is apparently ready to take the scissors to Bill Clinton's voluminous last-minute health regulations that alarm privacy defenders and medical professionals.

What isn't certain is how far Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson is prepared to go in overhauling the previous president's tome of proposed rules he promulgated shortly before leaving office.

Advocates of a national health scheme – which Hillary Clinton tried and failed to sell to Congress when she was first lady – and former Clinton administration officials have expressed concern that Thompson will gut the regs they have wanted for years to put in place.

Conservatives are outraged at what they perceive as a dark-of-the-night maneuver by Clinton to do just the opposite of providing privacy protection to individuals' medical files.

Health-industry representatives are aghast at the costly bureaucratic shackles it would impose on them.

Besieged from those three positions of the political battlefield, Thompson has until April 14 to exercise one of four options:

Kill the Clinton regs outright.

Draft his own substitute rules.

Let Clinton's rules go into effect as they are.

Wait until they become effective, Feb. 26, 2003, and then amend them, which Thompson also has authority under law to do.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Thompson told reporters Wednesday he was ruling out that first option, scrapping the Clinton regulations.

The newspaper said he indicated he would go with the second option, doing a rewrite, but he wouldn't specify how extensive that might be.

"There will be a medical privacy rule," Thompson promised.

"I'm fairly certain at this point, without saying for sure, there will be some modifications to simplify and lessen the financial burden."

That would indicate he is listening to a wide range of voices from the health industry, who see primarily the enormous financial cost and time drain the Clinton regs would inflict on them.

Conservatives are left to wonder how much, or even whether, Thompson is listening to their fears that the very rules Clinton left behind in the name of preserving medical-record privacy are just another scheme to pave the way for socialized medicine, with medical privacy only one of the casualties along the way.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have indicated that, if Thompson treats the Clinton rules too tenderly, they will introduce legislation that will not.

Clinton backers and leftist Democrats in Congress are angry that the Bush administration may ruin what they have been trying for years to bring about – a national government-run health plan that is coming to be known as HillaryCare.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Medical Privacy
Bush Administration

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