The Trump administration wants to require health insurance companies to hand over troves of sensitive, detailed, and identifiable medical records from millions of federal workers and retirees, along with their families. The move is raising immediate concern from legal and health policy experts, according to a report by KFF Health News.
The unprecedented proposal was quietly revealed in a short notice from the Office of Personnel Management in December, KFF notes. OPM said it is seeking “service use and cost data,” which would be harvested from medical records such as “medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data.”
That list could give the federal government access to prescriptions employees have filled and their diagnoses, as well as provider information, doctors’ notes, treatments, and visit summaries, among other sensitive health information. The collection would affect more than 8 million Americans and harvest data from 65 insurance companies, according to KFF.
The Trump admin talks about the Iran war, and it appears to have been quite real, but it is the people and their laws which seem to be constantly in the Admin’s sights. The people are getting one “bombshell” news item after another where long-settled law is under attack (in this case medical records privacy). Has the Executive Branch been taken over by a hostile economic power, either a foreign government or a corporate syndicate of some kind?
They may want to sell it to their friends to train a medical AI model.
Criminal corporate cartel. https://lemmy.ml/comment/25031895