Chansky: Keeping confidentiality
As a family physician, one of my priorities is protecting the privacy of my patients. Medical confidentiality is protected under a regulation known as HIPAA. This rule covers the way in which protected health information is handled, including details that could identify an individual and the information about specific health diagnoses.
I am extremely concerned about a variety of impending risks to this protected information. The largest breach of confidentiality is sharing personal identifying and medical information between Medicaid and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The U.S. Health Department reported an agreement between Medicaid and ICE that allows ICE to use Palantir software to access information about approximately 79 million Medicaid enrollees.
This data sharing is intended to help ICE more easily locate individuals that it believes are in the U.S. illegally. The reality is that unless an undocumented person is in significant distress, they will not qualify for Medicaid. Undocumented people make up only 6% of all people on Medicaid.
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, legislators are discussing laws to share health data on unhoused people with the intent of considering mandated medical treatment. While this is a population with a high prevalence of health issues, this legislation will not differentiate between those who might or might not benefit from treatments. The American Civil Liberty Union notes that the Department of Health and Human Services is advocating for an “autism registry” but hasn’t engaged with autistic populations to determine how this registry will serve their needs or detailed how the information will be kept confidential.
These are gross violations of our protected health information. Compromising our medical confidentiality also increases the risk of bad health outcomes. If patients fear for their privacy, they may not seek medical care until they are sicker and more desperate, and their health issues are harder to cure.
Contact your legislators, and tell them to keep protected medical information confidential.
Maria Yvonne Chansky
Glenwood Springs
