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Medical Hoax Slips Big Brother Into Your Private Business Wes Vernon, NewsMax.comWASHINGTON – Hillarycare is coming through the back door. By the time you know it’s there, it will be too late to stop it. Your confidential medical records will be public knowledge. In the next few years, it is going to become increasingly simple to transfer electronic medical records over the Internet. The back door to this invasion of your privacy is being held wide open in the Bush administration by many of the same bureaucrats who promoted socialized medicine under Bill Clinton. But key Bush administration people are letting it happen. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is sponsoring a bill that would force lawmakers to put their votes and political careers on the line. Do they favor forcing your doctor to reveal all your personal medical information to the prying eyes of government bureaucrats? Does your congressman favor that? Yes or no? No wiggle room. The trouble is, a spokesman for Paul told NewsMax.com, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and the congressional leadership "showed no interest.” Congress should vote to throw the whole voluminous set of regulations out the window, Tom Miller, director of health policy studies for the libertarian CATO Institute, opined. He was one of five panelists to address a medical privacy seminar Tuesday at the National Press Club. "They can’t have it both ways,” he added. This is not the first time that Congress, when confronted with a hot potato that can cause political backlash at the polls, has dumped it into the laps of the faceless bureaucrats and let them do the dirty work and take the rap for it. The key difference in the new policy, noted Lisa S. Dean, privacy specialist at the Free Congress Foundation, is that patient consent is no longer required to share the information far and wide. Now, all that is mandated is that the patient be notified. "The previous rule promulgated by the Clinton administration began with such egregious exceptions that these [Bush administration] alterations make an already terrible rule a little worse,” she told the participants at the seminar. Congressman Paul issued a statement on that very point. "Federal bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services have succeeded in implementing regulations which place every American’s medical records in the hands of government, by giving HMOs, insurance companies, medical researchers and other state-favored interests an enhanced right to view medical records without patient consent. … HHS is stripping patients of the last remnants of control over their health care.” The Clinton administration wanted to prohibit doctors and hospitals from getting patients' consent before releasing their medical information. Then, after a barrage of complaints, a weak, coercive consent provision was added. Now, even that is gone. The idea that nearly 2,000 pages of federal Health and Human Services Department rules will "protect privacy” is a "big lie,” Kent Snyder, executive director of the Liberty Committee, told NewsMax after the seminar ended. This war on patient privacy is being driven by the multimillion-dollar health care industry, Snyder charges. That means American Medial Association, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. They have "the highest-paid lobbyists in the world,” Snyder declared. 'They Are Lying' "They are lying when they call it privacy,” he said. "And the reason they’re getting away with it is most people just don’t believe this is going to happen.” "If this new [recently approved] denial of your doctor’s right to keep your health information confidential [gets a pass from Congress] then everything else [in the "anti-privacy” regulations] is meaningless,” James C. Pyles, a privacy rights attorney, warned his fellow panelists. "This gives the insurance [and medical industries] what they asked for and did not get.” Up until now, Pyles explained, if you sought your doctor’s help in dealing with a cut finger, he would not be authorized to give out your private information beyond what would be needed for the successful treatment involving your cut finger. Under the new rule, everything is out there for the world to see: Infertility, cancer, marriage counseling, there’s no end to it. The end result, said Pyles, is you will be discouraged from going to your doctor to get the finger treated. That could lead to medicine on the black market. It has been known to happen in other countries, he pointed out. And the political fallout to all this? Irony of ironies: The enabling legislation (the 1996 Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act, HIPAA) ended up authorizing the medical "privacy” rule in the first place. It was originally part of the Clinton administration’s effort to slip Hillary Clinton’s failed health care plan through the back door, piece by piece. Nonetheless, it appears that the Bush administration is going to take the political heat. Dems Get Clinton Scheme for Ammo Against Bush "This gives the Democrats lots of ammunition in the coming elections,” said Sue A. Blevins, founder and president of the Institute for Health Freedom. "Senator Kennedy is holding hearings on this privacy issue.” Well and good to hold hearings, but NewsMax.com raised the question at the seminar that politicians often would rather have the issue than a solution. Why can’t we have an up or down congressional vote sometime in the seven months before the November elections? The consensus seemed to be that’s not likely to happen. While her party picks up the political marbles, "Hillary is smiling at all this,” Snyder told NewsMax. She and her party are having it both ways.
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