🚀 go-pugleaf

TO: Newsgroups
FR: Jared Feuer, ACLU Internet Organizer
DT: February 8, 2000

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Department of Health and Human
Services have been engaged in a three-month debate over the public's ability
to weigh in on proposed medical privacy regulations.  The result is the
launch of an on-line campaign at http://www.aclu.org/action/medregs.

At the heart of this battle is that fact that the Department of Health and
Human Services has made it unnecessarily difficult for members of the
general public - the very people who will be most affected by the proposed
medical privacy regulations - to participate in the comment period on the
regulations, which closes next week, on February 17th.

Repeated attempts to work with HHS to find a way to facilitate comments from
the general public have led nowhere. And the ACLU is also concerned that HHS
may actually have thrown away the comments of the more than 2,400 citizens
who faxed in letters from the ACLU's web site, http://www.aclu.org, thanking
the administration for taking this first step and urging further
strengthening of the regulations in several areas.  Three of these areas are
the focus of the ACLU's new campaign.  The first concern is that the current
proposal does not require doctors to obtain a patient's authorization before
using the patient's medical records for treatment, payment, or health care
options.  The second is that law enforcement agents can issue written
demands for individual medical records without seeking judicial review.  And
the third is that the proposal permits health care providers to disclose
individual medical records to government agencies that will include the
records in a government health data system.

All three of these are significant privacy concerns that the current
proposal does not remedy. Yet it was only after 2,400 people had faxed in
their comments on these concerns that HHS first notified the ACLU that it
would not accept comments via fax. The only comments accepted will be those
mailed in quadruplicate, hand-delivered, or sent through online forms.
These forms however are not only unlinkable, but hidden in an archive on
HHS's site, closed off to the site's own search engine!

In response, the ACLU has created a web site using the HHS forms to allow
the public to easily make comments on every provision of the proposed
medical privacy regulations.  This site will only be up until February 17th
when the comment period ends.

The campaign can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/action/medregs

Posted December 3, 1999
Circulate and Redistribute through February 17, 2000

For the latest info on how to take action for civil liberties, sign up for
the ACLU's Action E-mail Network at: http://www.aclu.org/action/mailist.html
Other information on civil liberties in Congress can be found at:
http://www.aclu.org/congress/congress.html

Comments may be directed to the ACLU Internet Organizer at jfeuer@dcaclu.org