Yesterday, like the thief-in-the-night he is, installed president George Bush proposed dropping the privacy protections associated with medical records, saying that medical professionals should not have to obtain a patient’s consent before disclosing medical information for the purpose of treatment or getting paid.
The proposal was announced by secretary of health and human services, Tommy Thompson who cited that the current privacy rules could “impair access to quality health care.”
The health care industry was unanimously opposed to the privacy rules, originally instituted by President Clinton in late 2000. According to a New York Times article, pharmacists claimed they “could not fill prescriptions phoned in by a doctor for pick-up by a patient’s relative or neighbor.” Hospitals said “they could not schedule medical procedures until the patient had read a privacy notice and signed a consent form.”
In my experience with prescriptions and surgical procedures associated with end-stage renal disease, these statements are categorically false. My wife routinely picks up my prescriptions and a signed consent form was required for surgery long before the privacy rules were enacted.
Responding to charges of depriving patients of basic privacy rights with a doubletalk logic worthy of Orwell, Thompson responded, “The president believes strongly in the need for federal protections to ensure patient privacy, and the changes we are proposing today will allow us to deliver strong protections for personal medical information while improving access to care.”
Under the proposed change, health care providers would have to notify patients of the providers’ disclosure policies, but patients’ consent to the disclosure would not be required.
Congress is of no help with regard to this issue. The legislative body could try to set privacy standards, overriding any administration’s rules, but Congress has historically been unable to reach consensus on medical information privacy standards. In 1996, Congress directed the secretary of health and human services to set the standards.
The most pathetic aspect of all of this is that the current rules, established by the Clinton administration, don’t even require compliance until April 2003.
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