Posted on 03/30/2009 5:37:19 PM PDT by Als Politics
As every conservative voice has been trying to tell you since the stimulus package passed is that it was created so fast, pages upon pages of bureaucratic junk, all created for one primary purpose…..stimulus you say? Oh no, that wouldn’t be it; the main purpose was to change policies funded by lobbyists and groups of special interest. You have surely heard of the Republican Governors who are refusing specific “stimulus” money. They were refusing the certain batches of money because they required certain laws and policies to change that would end up costing their states more money in the long run, and therefore denied it.
These policy changes are slowly coming to light as more and more people are actually reading the 1100 page quagmire the Democrats have referred to as the “Stimulus Program.” The latest discovery involves the first part of the socialization of healthcare. Buried in the package was the initial power to change to all electronic health records. This move weakens the individual’s rights to privacy over their own health records, and hands that power instead to the Federal Government. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed into law in 1996 for the expressed need to have portability of health isurance from one carrier to another. A later provision in 2003 included a privacy clause that only allowed your health records to be given to health care clearinghouses, employer sponsored health plans, health insurers, and medical service providers that engage in certain transactions. When the government assumes the role through socialized medicine of “health insurer” or “medical service provider,” your privacy from the government will disappear.
This isn’t a pipe dream or a “what if situation,” this is here and already approved, and if Congress sees fit to enact the reconciliation bill (a way for the democrats to pass a bill with only 51 votes), to include far sweeping health care changes, all privacy issues become a moot point. As health records come into the electronic age, more personal information becomes available to anyone with the ability to hack into computers.
I challenge anyone to find a government program that has been not only successful but has been properly funded and is fiscally responsible. So with that being said, do we really want them managing our personal health care? Ask a Canadian one time about a timely diagnosis in their flawed health care system. Would you rather have a your personal doctor make a decision on your health care, or would rather have a decision made by a politician on who to treat and who they won’t treat based on probabilities of survivability? There is a question right now about if Natasha Richardson received a CT scan in Canada, after her skiing accident, and if her life could have been saved if she had gotten one. In the Canadian Healthcare system a cost analysis application has to be made before care is approved, basically circumventing effective emergency medical care.
Read the HI TECH portion- HIPAA has been tightened up in 10 different areas. Privacy has increased, not decreased.
We just got notices of additional measures we have to take to conform to HIPAA rules. I don’t think the rules have gotten any looser.
Rights under attack ping!
HIPPA never had anything to do with privacy. It was all about the insurance industry and their ability to take your private papers (4th amendment) and treat them like they didn’t belong to you, but to the insurance providers.
That is all.
BTTT
We don’t have privacy from the government anyway. If they want to know, all they have to do is audit a practice or hospital’s billing records
As was pointed out during the original debates over HIPPAA, its primary purpose was to provide a gateway for national healthcare.
One of its obvious goals was to make compliance so expensive as to bankrupt private healthcare plans. The first step of that has been the consolidation of small plans that were “undercapitalized” into big plans. OF course, “undercapitalized” means they didn’t have the cash flow to keep up with the constantly changing bureaucratic HIPPAAH regulations.
The next step is to bankrupt the big plans that are too big to fail. That gives the Feds the excuse to save them.
“Read the HI TECH portion- HIPAA has been tightened up in 10 different areas. Privacy has increased, not decreased.”
The government will still be able to control the records. Do you trust the Federal Government with your healthcare decisions?
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