About a year ago, I was stationed in Downtown DC on a particularly cool spring day, watching hundreds of federal employees lining up outside their office buildings.
In a humbling exercise, employees were waiting to test whether their entry badges still worked at the Department of Health and Human Services — or whether they would be turned back out by security as they were among the 10,000 unlucky people whose jobs were suddenly terminated.
I recall a recent day when I researched and reported on an important, under-the-radar proposal from the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal employees.
according to a notice posted In December, OPM is seeking information on individually identifiable medical and pharmaceutical claims on federal employees and retirees, as well as their family members, who are enrolled in the Federal Employee Health Benefits or Postal Service Health Benefits programs. Just over 8 million Americans get coverage through such plans.
Right now, 65 insurance companies maintain the data the agency wants, including prescriptions, diagnoses and treatment information. This would put a tremendous amount of personal information about federal employees into the hands of an administration that has earned a reputation for taking it Counterinsurgency against some workers as part of a crackdown on immigration and fraud and the sharing of sensitive data between agencies.
My colleague Maia Rosenfeld and I wanted to know what lawyers and ethicists working on health policy issues thought about this proposal.
On the one hand, sources told us, this kind of detailed data could be used by the federal government to improve the largest employer-sponsored health insurance system in the country.
But skepticism about the Trump administration’s intentions permeated every conversation we had.
“The concern here is that the more information they have, the more they can use it to discipline or target people who are not cooperating politically,” Sharona Hoffman, a health law ethicist at Case Western Reserve University, told me.
And, although the notice states that insurers are legally allowed to disclose “protected health information” to the agency for “monitoring,” Hoffman and others raised questions about OPM’s access to such a comprehensive database of medical records under federal health privacy laws.
Insurers — several of which declined to comment — are required to provide monthly reports to OPM with their members’ data. One insurer, CVS Health, said in a public comment that insurers may be breaking the law by providing information to OPM for “vague and broad general purposes.” The union representing several of these companies has also objected to the proposal, which has not yet been finalized.
OPM spokespeople did not respond to our repeated requests for comment.
