Question

Does the government have the right to assign each person born in the US a unique health identifier and then collect and store all your personal health information in a centralized data base?

Answer 1

Ans) Implementing a unique patient identifier would add nothing to our health care system beyond coercive surveillance.

- It would collect information about us without our consent or even our knowledge, much as the National Security Agency has been doing with telephone records.

- Patients are just people. Why bother with a number when scanning the iris of the eye is arguably a perfect way to identify each of us.

- The technology for doing this is becoming almost as inexpensive as that needed to read a credit card. It’s not a stretch to imagine iris scanners appearing in doctors’ offices, hospitals, ambulances, and the like to match individuals with their health records.

- That might be efficient, but it isn’t voluntary and offers us no say about what information is matched and who has access to it, nor does it offer any transparency into the process.

- There are other ways to accurately match individuals with information about them. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, is quite good at matching people with their financial information by asking for their name, date of birth, and Social Security number the first time they register at a bank or employer.

- For health, we could ask individuals to supply their name and an email address, cellphone number, or other familiar unique identifier. Then, whenever an entity wants to access an individual’s data, be it a physician, lab, pharmacy, insurer, or someone else, a notification would automatically be sent to the person by email or text asking if that’s what they intended. This kind of familiar opt-in system gives the individual control over his or her data and the ability to see who is looking at it.

- Access to our health information is a first-order privacy issue. Most of the matching and access is done for purposes that don’t benefit the patient. Some access is done for risk adjustment, some for marketing services, and some for setting prices while effectively keeping cost and quality in medicine a secret.

- Americans need a health care system that encourages trust in our doctors, labs, pharmacies, hospitals, and more. You don’t build trust in a system by introducing involuntary and coercive practices like a unique patient identifier just because they are efficient.