-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Doctors Group Decries 'Unconstitutional' Anti-Privacy Rules Wes Vernon Wednesday, March 28, 2001 WASHINGTON - The Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday received comments from a group of physicians charging that the proposed medical anti-privacy regulations, promulgated in the last days of the Clinton administration, "depend upon an unconstitutional provision that is obnoxious to most Americans” and "need to be withdrawn.” "This Administration should not be a party to the covert implementation of an essential piece of the Clinton Health Security Act that was rejected once Americans learned of its implications,” the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) said in a written statement to HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson. Katherine Serkes, AAPS public affairs counsel, told NewsMax.com: "This 1,500-page document is a direct result of the Clinton view that the government should control every aspect of our medical care. It is a desperate last-ditch effort to set the stage for Hillary’s vision of socialized medicine and eliminate your privacy.” Thompson has until April 14 to decide what to do with the Clinton regulations. Meanwhile, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has introduced "emergency legislation” aimed at blocking the "dangerous new medical regulations.” Congressman Paul, a physician for more than 30 years who still practices medicine, knows the critical importance of doctor-patient confidentiality. Commenting on the AAPS statement to Secretary Thompson, Serkes says these Clinton administration rules the secretary is considering are "masquerading as ‘medical privacy protection’ [and] were written to fulfill the ‘Administrative Simplification’ section of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.” Hillary Redux The physicians group says "administrative simplification” is a euphemism for government control of your records. Serkes says it is "a concept and term carried over from Hillary’s Health Care Task Force and the failed ClintonCare plan for government control of medicine and medical records.” The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons is a veteran of the battle against so-called HillaryCare. AAPS took a leading role in the early days of the Clinton administration in blocking that attempt to take over one seventh of the U.S. economy. You may remember it was the AAPS that successfully took Hillary Clinton’s task force to court to protest, among other things, the secrecy in which it had shrouded itself. The association lucked out in getting a federal judge, Royce Lamberth, who defined lawbreaking as, well, breaking the law. For this and other transgressions, the jack-booted mentality of the Clinton "spin” machine used congressional Democrats as a transmission belt to put out the word that Judge Lamberth could forget about any Supreme Court confirmation some day. The judge was unfazed by this attempted intimidation. Tuesday’s statement to HHS indicates that the AAPS believes the fight against Orwellian efforts to obtain access to your records continues unabated. In fact, the statement refers to that 1993 lawsuit, noting that the term "Administrative Simplification” was used frequently in the task force's documents. The latest HHS papers of the physicians organization explain that "Administrative Simplification" of which the privacy regulations are an integral part "depends on unique identifiers for both patients and physicians, and provides infrastructure for the complete government takeover of medicine envisioned by Clinton.” "Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to such identifiers, and the networked government-mandated data bases that they enable.” Memo Shows Privacy Was Targeted I have in my possession a copy of an internal AAPS memo dealing with a meeting almost exactly a year ago by a subgroup of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. This panel was created by the 1996 HIPAA to coordinate its provisions. The memo, written by Serkes, describes the last in a three-day series of meetings. The session in question was on late Friday afternoon, March 31, 2000. Serkes apparently was the only person in the room, aside from the committee members and perhaps their staff. It was "long after reporters and most of the spectators had bailed out,” she says, adding she doesn’t even think the members of the group "realized the implications/ramifications of what they decided.” It seems that the committee was faced with a "problem” of what to do about an obstinate public that refuses to fall in line and allow its medical records to be pawed over by bureaucrats in and out of government. The federal government, you see, could not implement the exchange of information "without some kind of systematic standard for identification of patient records.” Serkes tells NewsMax.com, "The federal government has decided to find a way to create a national data base of patient medical records and identify all their medical records, even though the public is against it and the funds for Patient Identifiers have been cut off by Congress.” No doubt this is due to such pesky worrywarts as Ron Paul and Dick Armey, R-Texas. Continuing with Serkes’ statement: "A rogue agency is trying to usurp the will of Congress and compromise our privacy, all in the name of ‘administrative ‘simplifications.’” According to the memo, "The group decided to write a new recommendation to the secretary [then Donna Shalala], stating that R&D funds under HIPAA be allocated to examine/research [new] ways to identify patient records.” Here are some of the exact statements made by members of this Workgroup on Computer-based Patient Records/Subcommittee on Standards and Security. "We need to get HIPAA identifiers out in a timely fashion.” "We need to reiterate in the body of the text the importance of the identifiers.” "Shouldn’t we now be looking [at the question of] are other standards to compensate for the lack of a Unique Patient Identifier? Such as Master Patient Index? In exchanging [emphasis added] patient medical records, use of the UPI [unique patient identifier] is crucial.” "We need to make some effort to best identify people most efficiently … maybe in the area of R&D to come up with something.” "We could include in [a report to the secretary] a discussion on identifiers and how to explore alternatives to UPI.” "People think they have privacy without a UPI, but privacy is already seriously compromised because we have so many ways to link up data already. We need to make the case that a UPI could actually help maintain privacy.” That is just a snapshot of the conversation that took place at HHS headquarters here in Washington that Friday afternoon a year ago. The next time someone says we need the government to make sure our privacy is not compromised in the private sector, this particular hearing transcript may conjure up the familiar visions of "the fox in the henhouse.” *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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