Medical Privacy: Caput

Bush Administration Quietly Eviscerates Medical Privacy Addendum
Nearly every physician practicing in the United States has sworn to uphold the 2,000-year-old Hippocratic Oath. Among other provisions, a physician taking the oath makes the following pledge:
"I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know."
However, in the last five years, the administration of President George W. Bush systematically undermined the privacy requirements of the Hippocratic Oath, and other legal and customary measures protecting medical privacy.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1996, Congress enacted what was purported to be an omnibus medical privacy statute, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
In 2001, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued preliminary regulations under HIPAA requiring patient consent for third party use of "protected health information," including its use for such common activities as treatment, billing and "other healthcare operations."
In 2002, however, HHS inexplicably substituted the words "regulatory permission" for "patient consent." This tiny change in the regulations' wording opened up the floodgates for the disclosure of previously confidential health information without a patient's consent.
As a result, according to the Privacy Rights Foundation, some 800,000 companies, government agencies and other organizations can tap into your personal medical information almost at will. And they're not required to tell you what they do with it.