The Candidates and Privacy of Your Health Records: Barack Obama
Part of a series on Election 2008 that looks at the candidates’ positions or statements on the privacy of your health records and medical privacy (excluding abortion).
To see what other candidates have done or said on this issue, see the other files in this series on Senator Hillary Clinton, Representative Ron Paul, Senator John McCain, Mike Gravel, and Governor Mike Huckabee.
Senator Obama’s communications team responded promptly to my initial inquiry by replying that they’d get back to me. That night, I received an unsolicited campaign mailing. Not only had my media inquiry been added to their campaign’s mailing list, but because I had given the communications team my real name in making the request, my name was now on a list that I did not want it to be on. I emailed the campaign to take me off that list and that it was just a media inquiry.
Three weeks later, I still hadn’t heard from the communications team with a reply to my question or an offer of an interview. Whether my “don’t spam me” message dropped me to the bottom of the pile or was just coincidental, I can’t say. But using the same search techniques that I used for the other candidates, I can find nothing in Senator Obama’s congressional record or speeches to indicate that he has ever addressed the privacy of health records in any meaningful way. The only references I found at all were the following:
Senator Obama’s PLAN FOR A HEALTHY AMERICA (pdf) of October 2007 contains references to privacy but no indication of how he will accomplish these goals:
(3) LOWERING COSTS THROUGH INVESTMENT IN ELECTRONIC HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS. Most medical records are still stored on paper, which makes them difficult to use to coordinate care, measure quality, or reduce medical errors. Processing paper claims also costs twice as much as processing electronic claims. 38. Obama will invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records. He will also phase in requirements for full implementation of health IT and commit the necessary federal resources to make it happen. Obama will ensure that these systems are developed in coordination with providers and frontline workers, including those in rural and underserved areas. Obama will ensure that patients’ privacy is protected. A study by the Rand Corporation found that if most hospitals and doctors offices adopted electronic health records, up to $77 billion of savings would be realized each year through improvements such as reduced hospital stays, avoidance of duplicative and unnecessary testing, more appropriate drug utilization, and other efficiencies.39
And on his web site, in the Technology section, there is a general section on right to privacy:
- Safeguard our Right to Privacy: The open information platforms of the 21st century can also tempt institutions to violate the privacy of citizens. Dramatic increases in computing power, decreases in storage costs and huge flows of information that characterize the digital age bring enormous benefits, but also create risk of abuse. We need sensible safeguards that protect privacy in this dynamic new world. As president, Barack Obama will strengthen privacy protections for the digital age and will harness the power of technology to hold government and business accountable for violations of personal privacy.
- To ensure that powerful databases containing information on Americans that are necessary tools in the fight against terrorism are not misused for other purposes, Barack Obama supports restrictions on how information may be used and technology safeguards to verify how the information has actually been used.
- Obama supports updating surveillance laws and ensuring that law enforcement investigations and intelligence-gathering relating to U.S. citizens are done only under the rule of law.
- Obama will also work to provide robust protection against misuses of particularly sensitive kinds of information, such as e-health records and location data that do not fit comfortably within sector-specific privacy laws.
- Obama will increase the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement budget and will step up international cooperation to track down cyber-criminals so that U.S. law enforcement can better prevent and punish spam, spyware, telemarketing and phishing intrusions into the privacy of American homes and computers.
If you know of statements or information on this candidate with respect to the issue of privacy of health care information or records, please post it in the comments section for this entry. I will update the files if/when I find more.
