Feds slammed for not protecting privacy

Health-care advocates say a General Accounting Office report that found the federal government could not guarantee patients' medical privacy is not only accurate, but provides a glimpse of how helpless health-care consumers are when their privacy is breached.

The GAO report, released late last month, found of 25 federal agencies, compliance with Privacy Act requirements and those of the Office of Management and Budget – which oversees implementation of the act – was "uneven."

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"As a result of this uneven compliance, the government cannot adequately assure the public that all legislated individual privacy rights are being protected.

The GAO said while it found 100 percent compliance among the agencies in issuing a rule "explaining to the public why personal information is exempt from certain provisions of the act," the congressional watchdog estimated "71 percent compliance with the requirement that personal information should be complete, accurate, relevant and timely before it is disclosed to a nonfederal organization."

The agency also said OMB leadership was needed to improve overall federal-government compliance.

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Sue Blevins, spokeswoman for the Institute for Health Freedom, said the government's inability to protect medical records and privacy was obvious.

"I don't even need to read [the GAO report] to know the government can't guarantee privacy," she told WorldNetDaily. "How can the government guarantee medical privacy when under the new massive federal privacy rules, when [a consumer] goes to complain about a breach, there is no guarantee that it will even be investigated?"

"That is such a major loophole in the law," Blevins added.

Worse, Blevins said, patients whose privacy has been abused "get nothing, even if the government fines the guilty party." She said firms or health-care facilities that release private patient information inadvertently may have to pay a fine to the government, but the patient "is left empty-handed," with privacy information out in the public domain.

There is "almost an incentive for [the government] to allow the privacy breaches," she said, since the feds collect the fines.

As WorldNetDaily reported, critics of the government's medical-privacy rule never had much faith in it to begin with. They have said the rules, first developed during the Clinton administration, actually strip patients of protections rather than strengthen them.

"The … rule eliminates patient consent and gives the federal government access to each and every citizen's personal medical records – without patients' permission," Blevins said in an interview in April.

The government has defended the rule, which took effect April 14.

"From the time of Hippocrates, privacy in medical care has been of prime importance to patients and to the medical profession," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said in announcing the rule's implementation.

"… As electronic data transmission is becoming ingrained in our health-care system, we have new challenges to insure that medical privacy is secured. While many states have enacted laws giving differing degrees of protection, there has never before been a federal standard defining and ensuring medical privacy," he said. "Now new federal standards are coming into force to protect the personal health information of every American patient."

But Twila Brase, RN, a spokeswoman for Citizen's Council on Health Care, said the GAO report spells out a different story.

"This report should give Congress a good reason to reconsider building yet another database of citizen information," she said, referring to the proposed National Patient Safety Database under consideration in Congress.

"One system of records holds data on 290 million people. If that system happens to be one of the systems that's out of compliance, the privacy rights of every citizen have already been violated, perhaps many times," said Brase.

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, says government bureaucracy can't guarantee privacy.

"Demanding lots of mandatory reports will compromise patients' privacy and overload the system with trivia, hampering its ability to respond to what is really important," she told USA Today.

And Kathyrn Serkes, public affairs counsel for AAPS, added the new rules are so invasive patients will need "Miranda warnings" before answering medical questions.

AAPS has developed a standard privacy form patients can download, sign and give to their physicians.

"While masquerading as patient protection, the rules would actually eliminate any last shred of confidentiality and risk lives," she said. "The frontline defense for medical privacy always has been the patient's right to give or withhold consent to how his records are used and who sees them. These rules throw that out the window."

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