WASHINGTON, D.C. - Montana’s Congressman, Denny Rehberg, has increased pressure on the Obama Administration to abandon plans by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a government database of private health care information for reinsurance and risk adjustment programs.  Rehberg contacted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last month seeking clarification of the rule and warned that such a database threatens the privacy of Americans.  He recently joined over three-dozen House colleagues in asking Secretary Sebelius to reject current proposals to create a national health care database.

“It’s hard to imagine a worse intrusion on our civil liberties than a federal health care database that centralizes the personal health care records of all Americans.  Not to mention the fact it also would seriously jeopardize the private relationship between doctor and patient,” said Rehberg, Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. “I voted against the President’s health care law because I knew Montanans wouldn’t like what it empowered their government to do.  Simply put, this law is a massive expansion of government into the lives of Americans.  It’s just plain wrong.”

The latest proposal by HHS contains three options for creating a national database, two related to centralized databases run through either the federal or state government for health risk model calculations, and a third approach where insurance agencies submit individual health risk scores requiring the submission of raw claims data for government verification.

“President Obama’s ‘leap before you look’ approach to health care reform has already lead to higher health care costs, a loss of health care choices, and an ever-increasing national debt,” said Rehberg. “In the end, this unpopular bill may be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. I continue to believe that a better plan can be worked out when the parties in Washington, D.C. and the American public all sit down together for the future of our country and our children.”

The letter sent by Rehberg and his colleagues is below:

Dear Secretary Sebelius,

I am writing in reference to the proposed rule for Standards Related to Reinsurance, Risk Corridors and Risk Adjustment that appeared in the Federal Register, Volume 76, No.136, pages 41930-41956. I am deeply concerned by the proposed options for data collection under risk adjustment, which would give bureaucrats access to health information about every American.

Options one and two are especially troublesome as they require the submission of extremely sensitive private health care data and private insurer actuarial risk model calculations to a federal or state centralized health care database. Option three is hardly better. The calculation of individual risk scores requires raw claims data, and even if insurers calculate risk scores themselves, the federal government would need to access raw claims data in order to review and verify the accuracy of insurer risk scores. Regardless of whether the data collection would involve raw claims data or individual risk scores, the creation of such a risk adjustment database constitutes extreme government overreach, impinges on patients’ rights to privacy and jeopardizes fair competition in the health care market.

The aggregation of such a large amount of confidential information in a single database also presents a serious security risk. There have been significant data security breaches at the VA, USDA, DOD, DOE, and even HHS itself. In fact, all nineteen departments have reported at least one loss of personally identifiable information in the last eight years. It is inexcusable that the federal government has been responsible for putting confidential information for hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk. The creation of yet another database only increases the chances of such a breach occurring again.

Implementation of a database would also be incredibly costly and time-consuming. Given our country’s current fiscal situation, the last thing the federal government needs to do is involve itself in what would be one of the largest and perhaps most costly data grabs in American history. I urge you to reject the current proposed rule and protect the privacy of American citizens.

Sincerely,