I exercised an unusual move in Medical Affairs last week. Sen. Shane Martin and myself placed a “minority report” on H. 4538, a bill to create a government run portal connecting all healthcare providers in this state. This portal would give access to the health care records of all South Carolinians. Hospitals, pharmacies, doctor’s offices, clinics, rehabilitation clinics, dentists, etc. would all have the connectivity to treat you more efficiently so say the bills proponents. Sounds good right?
I objected to this bill because I’m not so sure I want a government agency in charge of a mega-database with very sensitive records of all of our citizens. This database would have the potential to be accessed by the 100+ thousand healthcare workers in this state. Don’t you think there may be 1 dishonest person in our medical workforce that would love a couple of thousand bucks to give a hacker the login information to this system? Or at least one incompetent person could mistakenly reveal this sensitive data? At this time, H. 4538 sounds like a recipe for disaster. So SC will have to wait ’til next year to take on this Obamacare initiative.
IF, we’re going to do this, we’re not going to do it in the last 3 weeks of session. The last month of session is the most dangerous time for the taxpayers of South Carolina. Bills will be ping ponging from the Senate to the House back and forth to meet the deadline before the end of 118th session.
After some research, our office found most American’s agree from across the political spectrum
From right winger Bob Barr’s blog: “A recent survey conducted by the respected and nonpartisan Ponemon Institute questioned some 850 Americans from diverse backgrounds and views and from 45 different states. The just-released study found that a whopping 75 percent of Americans do not support a database of private health information in the hands of the federal government. The vast majority of Americans – 85% according to the Ponemon survey – are not even aware that such a move is in the works; that such a proposal was in fact suck into the health care legislation passed recently by both the House and the Senate.
From the leftist ACLU: The ACLU of Oregon led the effort to oppose this law. We argued that our private and personal medical information should not be the subject of surveillance by the state government and accessed by thousands of pharmacists and health care providers across the state. This law treats all Oregonians as potential drug abusers, in an attempt to ferret out a small percent of those who are inappropriately seeking drugs.
In April, the Virginia prescription database was breached, exposing over 8 million Virginians to medical identity theft. Even after this incident, proponents continued to assert the breach was only alleged. However, Virginia sent out notices to over half a million Virginians alerting them to the data theft, and the database was off line for more than two months. (As we’ve argued, these databases are particularly attractive for criminals because they put in one place sensitive and valuable information about millions of individuals.)
South Carolina has the same database for narcotic drugs. I voted against the bill, however, I regret not taking a stronger position a few years back when this bill was being debated.
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