By Jill Young Miller / WASHINGTON BUREAU

Shalala. is critical of how medical records are protected.

Believe It. Under federal law, your video-rental records may be are protected safer than your medical records. The situation has prompted Congress to make medical privacy a front-burner issue. Consider: In Florida, the names of about 4,000 HIV-positive patients were sent on computer disks, anonymously, to two newspapers A public health worker and his ex-partner were implicated.

 New issue: Medical Privacy

 Federal law protects the privacy of motor vehicle records, credit records and others. But no federal law specifically protects the confidentiality of medical records. which are increasingly held in massive computer databases, not locked in doctors' filing cabinets. "The way we protect the privacy of our medical records right now is erratic at best, dangerous at worst," said Donna Shalala, U.S. Health and Human Services secretary. "God knows where your record's going now," said John Roberts, a privacy advocate at the Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union. "There's nothing much to control it, unless you're in a state that has pretty good privacy legislation or if your doctor or your HMO has really strict confidentiality policies." Now Congress is poking around in the privacy issue. It has to enact a major medical privacy law next year, under a deadline imposed in last year's law to help millions of Americans keep their health insurance when they change jobs.

"We have reached a critical juncture in deciding the level of privacy rights that Americans will hold over their medical records," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. one of several lawmakers who have introduced privacy legislation for Congress to consider when it reconvenes.

 Even within the health-care system, records move too broadly without patients' consent, the ACLU's Roberts said. "You may have a dermatologist, he said. "They don't need to know whether you had an abortion."

 Information about patients is big business. Managed care companies, health maintenance organizations, drug companies and hospitals spend up to $15 billion a year on technology to exchange vast amounts of medical information about Americans, Leahy said. Dr. Denise Nagel, a psychiatrist and executive director of the National Coalition for Patient Rights, keeps an ever-growing list of patients' privacy problems. Among them: A Massachusetts's man who enrolled in a program for sexual impotency was dismayed to receive mailings about various treatments. A California woman was fixing dinner when a researcher called to discuss breast cancer, which the woman had beaten a decade earlier -- and didn't even want to think about. A man in Maryland delayed going to his doctor about his high blood pressure because he did not want his employer to know. He subsequently had a stroke and died.

If such individual stories aren't troubling enough, consider that, according to Time, at least a third of all Fortune 500 companies regularly review health information before making hiring decisions. It's not only patients who worry. A.G. Breitenstein, director of the Boston-based Justice Resource Institute's health law program, tells of a doctor who intentionally "doodles" in the margins of her patients' records. The doodles are coded messages about what her patients tell her. The doctor says the doodles protect her patients, because the records are sent to insurance companies and are accessible to employers. "You don't know whose hands this information is going to," said Wachsman, whose cholesterol test found its way to New Jersey. "God forbid I had cancer or AIDS." Scattered throughout Florida's statutes are dozens of protections for patient records at public agencies. Next year, the Florida Senate is expected to consider consolidating those protections, and spell out the right to confidentiality.

The Legislature also may consider creating a law detailing what confidentiality protections apply in the private sector. Current law says medical records are confidential. but new legislation would de In Washington, one of the broadest proposals before Congress, sponsored by Leahy, would give people the right to inspect, copy and supplement their medical records. It also would allow patients to decide to whom, and under what circumstances, health information would be disclosed.

 The national health insurance law passed last year ordered Health and Human Services to suggest guidelines to Congress to guard Americans' health records. Shalala introduced benchmarks for legislation in a report to a Senate panel in September.

Allow patients to designate who has access to information that can be linked to them. I establish criminal penalties for anyone who gets health information under false pretenses, OF who knowingly discloses or uses medical information in violation of the new federal privacy law. But patient privacy advocates say the HHS plan is not specific enough to truly protect the confidentiality of individuals' records -- and could make problems worse. Especially alarming is the idea of a national identification number for all patients, called a "unique health identifier," making it possible to track a patient's every encounter with the health care system.

"If everyone is allowed into the house, why put a lock on the door?" Breitenstein said. At a recent congressional hearing, she urged senators to imagine themselves in an examination room with a doctor. "Imagine yourself undressed in that paper Johnny, split up the back. Imagine discussing your rectal bleeding, your mental health concerns or your child's brush with drugs," she told them. "And then think about the decision you face with regard to how many people and entities you are going to allow into the room with you"

 .

Is it not amazing that here is the Head of the Health care industry talking about the very problem that I have discovered and brought to light yet I'm being castigated for this and wrongfully at that. ( I have not received response to my letter either )

HEY I KNOW WHAT IT IS……these folks knew just what kind of activist I was and they are making a test case out of this to see how far it would go. I mean after all there is not another fool that believes as strongly as I do about freedom and the need to protect it.

What we have here is a precedence setting case.

.

E-Mail Address for Nursing Organizations

Email Address for US Senate………………

E-Mail Address for US House of Representatives

Is a BEAR of a job but if you like you can also reach the whole Nation trough the air ways via Radio and TV Links

We the people can make changes.!!

And if you E-Mail this Journalists will help us all.

************* NOTE OF INTEREST *********************

I have been caring for the American Way of life for a while now.... you can see the other part of me on the other Web Site that I also maintain. That Web-Site deal's with the POW/MIA Issue Please visit it and get involved there are still men left behind and they need your help also. Visit " THE REAPER'S EDGE A POW's SCREAMED ECHO IN CYBERSPACE "

• Disclaimer.
• Links to:
• Psychiatry & Nursing,------More Psychiatry ----- Consumer Agencies & other Sites
• Journalism--------Law research------Government-----1-Psychiatric---2 Survivors-- Links--(3)
• Personal Web Areas-------Privacy and Security---------Jose's Home area--
• Bad Psychiatry-----------Whistle Blowers.......Educational/-/Psych/-/Software

Back to starting page.

.Contacting Jose via E-ail..Mailto:onenurse@noangle.com

Back to starting page.