It was revealed yesterday that, as you sign up for insurance through Healthcare.gov, you actually surrender all privacy rights to personal information. This morning, during testimony in the House Committee of Energy and Commerce, the representative from CGI, Ms. Campbell, swore under oath that the website was HIPPA compliant, then said that there was a hidden source code that read, “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this information system.”
This is a scary revelation. This put every piece of information given over the website in jeopardy. Hackers are already salivating at the mother lode of information soon to be at their fingertips. This would be a huge violation of patient privacy except the (un)Affordable Care Act never cared about privacy, any more than those behind it.
Upon passage of the (un)Affordable Care Act in 2010, HIPPA died a quiet death, relegated to the doctors and nurses involved in a patients care. Patient privacy went no further. The new law established the Electronic Medical Records, a clearing house containing all health matters for every patient. It was proposed as a method to provide better medical care for a person, no matter where they were. A person on vacation hundred of miles away from home, who suffers a heart attack and goes to the nearest hospital, gets quicker care because the doctors have the same information as the patient’s home doctor. It’s basically a good idea.
However, upon passage of the bill, there was a rush of many federal agencies to get access to the information. To make it even more valuable to those agencies, doctors, or their nurses or other staff are under orders to ask questions concerning behaviours of patients. Do you feel safe at home? Do you have weapons in the house? The answers to these questions, along with the list of medications taken, could, in some places, warrant confiscation of any guns in the house. A diagnosis of PTSD, becoming ever more prevalent, could do the same thing. The fact is, any information given to medical personnel that goes into the EMR, goes to any number of federal agencies, from the IRS, the monitors of the law (scary enough), to the FBI, NSA, CIA and many other acronyms.
The revelation of the hidden source code telling visitors to the website that they have lost their privacy, along with their information, is nothing more than a smoke screen. In reality, they lost it, to the government, the day the bill became law in 2010!
marjarhead1 