The Trump Administration Wants Your Private Medical Records 

It’s honestly impressive how the Trump administration finds new and inventive ways to be shady. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is requesting hospitals send sensitive medical records of all patients who may visit to a private contractor.

A report from KFF and CNN found that the CPSC has requested 100 U.S. hospitals begin submitting information regarding patient visits to Konza Health. In the past, hospitals would voluntarily send data to the CDC with all identifying information scrubbed. What makes the CPSC’s request so strange is that they don’t just want medical information, but names and addresses as well. 

I love how the so-called “party of small government” is all in on destroying any shred of personal privacy. 

“The whole thing is troubling,” Sharona Hoffman, a professor of health law at Case Western Reserve University, told KFF. “If this company really is collecting identifiable information, that is worrisome for patients.”

Now, it would make sense if the CPSC was only looking for information related to injuries caused by consumer products. The fact they want information for all hospital visits is sketchy and has alarmed experts and even a former head of the agency.

Alexander Hoehn-Saric, the agency’s former chairman, told KFF he was surprised that the CPSC would demand hospitals provide identifiable records from all emergency room visits. “This idea that they can simply demand patient information from a hospital and that the hospital would provide it — I really don’t understand the basis for that,” he said.

President Donald Trump fired three of CPSC’s Democratic commissioners, leaving the agency without leadership. So a small, understaffed agency without leadership is expected to compile and protect sensitive medical data for millions of Americans. There’s no way this can go wrong. 

Steve Roney, CPSC spokesperson, told KFF in an emailed statement that the CPSC is “modernizing” its surveillance system. Roney was evasive when asked if the CPSC will file complaints against hospitals that do not participate, saying that while the previous system “operated as a voluntary program, the ability of hospitals to opt out limited the sample size and usefulness of the data.”

Konza has described participation in the program as “mandatory” or “required,” though many medical professionals are skeptical over Konza’s and the CPSC’s authority to demand such information. 

There are also concerns among medical professionals over the apparent shadiness of the move, as the CPSC has yet to formally notify the public of the program.

From KFF:

Federal law requires the agency to provide notice and a public comment period before requesting information from 10 or more entities, a step it has not taken despite plans for 100 hospitals to join the surveillance system. KFF Health News independently confirmed with over a dozen hospitals that they had been approached.

Federal public health authorities cannot legally mandate that private health data be reported. But CPSC officials have suggested publicly and privately that if hospitals decline to share data with the new surveillance system, they could be subject to strict penalties from a data-sharing regulation known as “information blocking.”

Yet some hospital executives say they are reluctant to share patients’ sensitive data because they’re concerned about a different violation — that of federal privacy law.

One of the weirdest features of Trump’s second term has been his willingness to have agencies collect data or enforce rules that are far outside their traditional purview. In Trump’s bizarre crusade to dismantle the Education Department, student loans have been placed under the control of the Treasury Department. In Trump’s bizarre crusade to end mail-in voting, he ordered the United States Postal Service to create a rule requiring postal workers to toss mail-in ballots in states that don’t submit sensitive voter data to the federal government.

And now we have the CPSC trying to do a worse version of a dismantled CDC program for reasons that are still unclear. It’s crazy how none of these moves are going to improve housing affordability or bring down the costs of consumer goods. You know, the main thing that the majority of U.S. citizens are concerned about. 

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Heads Up: The Trump Administration Wants Your Private Medical Records was originally published on newsone.com