Electronic Health Records for All, Whether We Want Them or Not
In the short time I have been writing for Technorati, I've touched on such light and airy topics as immigration reform, Donald "I Want to Kiss the British Health System on the Mouth...with Tongue" Berwick, and the gradual collapse of the so-called Obama honeymoon. This time around, I thought I would offer a few thoughts on how the federal government seemingly wants to know every last detail about your health in an easy to digest electronic format.
In case you haven't heard, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced new regulations on Tuesday that lay out new federal specifications for electronic health records (EHRs). These EHRs will be required for all Americans by 2014. As you may or may not recall, the idea of an EHR was first brought to light with the passage of last year's stimulus bill, better known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). At the time of its passage, ARRA was to allocate roughly $19 billion to establish the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and, according to CNSNews.com on Feb. 12, 2009, would include "a provision creating a federal database" of EHRs. Well sure...I'm completely comfortable with something like this, because at least we know our records will be safe, and we can rest easy knowing that they couldn't possibly be compromised by, say, highly ambitious hackers or Russian spies. Our secrets are 100 percent safe, boy howdy.
To borrow a line from Dennis Miller, "Now I don't want to get off on a rant here," but the idea that the Obama administration wants to store my medical records in some sort of federal government database makes me more nervous than an incontinent Chihuahua strapped to a vibrating massage chair. Keep in mind that we're talking about the same federal government that has given us the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiasco, nearly 10 percent unemployment when it was assured it wouldn't rise above 8 percent, and Joe Biden. I'd trust the Barefoot Bandit as the head of security at a car dealership before I'd have even the most fleeting thought of trusting some federal "coordinator" stooge to keep any of my health records, electronic or otherwise.
Having said that, I'll at least go as far as saying that I actually understand some of the reasons for an EHR, one of them being that, based on another CNSNews.com report from July 16, they are "engineered to be easily transferable among different doctors and hospitals so as to eliminate the creation of duplicate or disparate records among different health care providers..." Fine, I get it, but here's a little kicker: the same July 16 report also goes on to state that any medical providers or facilities that don't necessarily want to go along with the federal database will be penalized.
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