HHS plans to tag every American with a medical ID

Human Events, Aug 21, 1998

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is forging ahead with a controversial plan to assign every American citizen a health information identification number.

These numbers will allow every government bureaucrat, HMO executive, and anyone else with access to a widespread computer network to pull up all the healthcare information available on any American.

A little-noticed proposal by Rep. David Hobson (R.Ohio) that mandated the new program was rolled into the massive 1996 Kassebaum-Kennedy health-care reform legislation. The provision allows HHS to implement the idea of a national medical identification number as it sees fit, if Congress fails to pass its own version of an ID system by the end of 1999.

HMOs and other health-care industry companies favor the proposal as an aid to efficiency.

As HHS began formulating plans this year to implement the system, an uproar ensued when congressmen and privacy activists realized what was happening. Ten days after legislation was introduced July 21 to kill any national health ID, Vice President Gore said that strict privacy protections would be implemented as part of the program.

"Privacy is a basic American value, in the Information Age and in every age," Gore said.

HHS Secretary Donna Shalala announced the administration's privacy protections on August 11. "The proposals we are making today set a national standard for protecting the security and integrity of medical records when they are kept in electronic form," Shalala said.

She then called on Congress to pass into law some privacy protections of its own. "It is crucial to have these standards, as we move increasingly toward electronic medical records. But it is also not enough. In addition, we urgently need new legal protections to safeguard the privacy of medical records in all forms."

Any 14-Year-Old With a Modem

HHS's protections are designed to limit access to a patient's records to doctors and health-care personnel who need them, as well as the patient's insurance company executives. Researchers would be allowed access to records only with information that could identify a patient deleted.

But a spokeswoman for HHS admitted that with someone's ID number and access to any of hundreds of thousands of computer terminals across the country, someone with just little knowledge of computers could read anyone's physical and mental health-care records.

"Any 14-year-old with a modem could access your information," complained Michael Sullivan, spokesman for Rep. Ron Paul (R.-Tex.), who was the sponsor of the July 21 legislation to forbid the federal government from implementing any kind of ID system. A week later, the House GOP leadership inserted similar language into the Patient Protection Act, which the House then passed, despite the objections of Paul and many other conservatives that it is unwarranted government interference in the market that will only shore up HMOs.

The Senate, however, will almost certainly not take up Patient Protection this year, meaning that passage of Paul's bill, or one of four other weaker proposals, would be needed to stop HHS's plans. Yet no hearings have been scheduled on any of these measures for the rest of this session.

The push for medical ID numbers-originally included in Hillary Clinton's massive health-care reform proposal-is actually part of the Clinton Administration's plan to implement piece by piece that 1993 scheme that failed so miserably.

The government has never mandated a national ID system since Social Security numbers were first assigned in 1935.

"The federal government has no authority to endanger the privacy of personal medical information by forcing all citizens to adopt a uniform health identifier for use in a national database," said Paul on July 21. "A uniform health ID endangers constitutional liberties, threatens doctor-patient relationships, and opens the door to federal officials' accessing deeply personal medical information for political purposes."