On April 14th, your doctor and virtually everyone who is involved in medicine must become "compliant" with the "Privacy Act." This act is designated in newspeak.
There is no privacy of medical information at the present: your doctor will be subject to sanctions including removal from participation with Medicare, medicaid and all insurances which accept money from Medicare if he does not allow the inspection of his office on demand by anyone who is a 'representative" of the US.Secretary of Health, which includes State law officers and health care bureaucrats.
What little protection you have - no information may recorded or demanded without supoena - will disappear under the "Privacy Act" and the "Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act." (Also known as HIPPA)
A very few doctors who do not use faxes or computers to transmit records or file their bills to insurance companies by computers and who do not do business with anyone who does, will be able to refrain from "voluntary" compliance.
(Medicare allows paper filing of claims, but the rules say they will not consider paper claims for 45 days after they are received, while they pay electronic claims in 2 to 4 weeks. Some insurances and medicaid payers do require electronic filing and verification or pre-authorization.)
The regulations are not final, although they were legacies of that last week of Clinton and Donna Shalala before President Bush was sworn in.
You will have more signs to read and consents to sign when you go to your doctor. Your medical information will belong to anyone in any government or quasi-government organization, including Law Enforcement.
For more information:
http://www.aapsonline.org/confiden/boswell.htm
Infringements of HIPPA are subject to fines of $50000 and up.
From the AAPS website:
"The Privacy Rule commands essentially unlimited
means, allowing dissemination of personal medical records in broad circumstances
and even requiring their distribution in others. It bypasses well-established
protections of judicial process for the Secretary to seize medical records. In effect
for more than a year, the Rule is plenty ripe for challenge. It even has a retroactive
effect in subjecting past medical records to the same loss of privacy as future ones."
""The Privacy Rule creates federal power to access personal medical records
without a warrant or showing of cause. The records seized need not be connected
with any federal program. The communications by patients to physicians subject
to this access can be unrelated to payment for services. Once accessed, there are
no meaningful protections against further dissemination of the information. The
Privacy Rule even forswears any ability to stop publication once the information
falls into the hands of a non-covered entity, such as an employer, insurer, or
adversary of the patient or physician. 65 Fed. Reg. 82712.""
http://www.aapsonline.org/judicial/hipaalaw.htm
It may be too late to prevent this.
Incrementalism works both ways. But I'm looking for some sunshine.
The most heavy-handed aspect of the new federal rules is the unprecedented government access to everyone’s private medical records. While masquerading as patient protection, the rules would actually eliminate any last shred of patient confidentiality. "[The Regulations]...allow government virtually unrestricted access to those same records without a warrant," states the complaint.
When it comes to government prying, these rules obliterate any remote notion of patients’ rights. Doctors are required to disclose all patients records to thousands of federal bureaucrats -- with or without consent, including handwritten notes and psychiatric records. "...consent forms [are] provided to patients as a condition for treatment...[therefore] such consent is coercive and cannot constitute a valid waiver of Fourth Amendment rights."
Law enforcement agencies will have unrestricted access to all records -- including notes about drug use, family interactions and other confessions. But it gets even worse. Not only can doctors be fined or imprisoned (up to $50,000 and one year) for withholding records, patients can be denied treatment if they refuse to sign the consent form. "Plaintiff AAPS has patient members who are already reluctant to provide information to their physicians due to the broad access to such information provided by the Privacy Regulations to the government."