Obama’s Stimulus Will Allow the Sale of Personal Health-Care Records

  Today President Obama signed the stimulus bill, a bill contains a $19 billion earmark to electronically centralize everyone’s personal health-care records under the new government hack office of  “National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.” A bill that also prohibits the government from selling these same personal health records…except for when they can.

 The stimulus bill proclaims that the sale of a person’s new centralized health-care records is strictly prohibited– right before it lists FIVE pages worth of exceptions.

Though the legislation says there is a “prohibition on sale of electronic health records or protected health information,” there are five pages of exceptions to the prohibition that include research, treatment of an individual, or a decision by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to waive the prohibition.

  One of the exceptions to the rule is that your records could be sold for the public good, the greater good.

One exception listed in the legislation is if, “The purpose of the exchange is for public health activities.”

 Private records are supposed to be private records, yet this exception states that your records could be sold for PUBLIC health reasons.

  But then there is the clause that states the secretary of the new bogus government organization that I listed above can decide to just sell a person’s health records for whatever the hell reason he/she seems fit.

Another exception is rather broad saying, “The purpose of the exchange is otherwise determined by the secretary in regulations to be similarly necessary and appropriate”

 For whatever reason the secretary deems appropriate a person’s personal medical information can be sold. To me that negates the whole notion of the original claim that a person’s health-care records cannot be sold. This gives the secretary of the new organization a blank check to sell anybody’s medical records for any reason.

 I am not against computerizing people’s medical records, it seems much more efficient to me, but when the government starts talking about ANY reasons that makes it permissible for the government to sell my private information; then I have a problem.

 This is an invasion on the right to privacy, this is unacceptable.