Deputizing Doctors
BY TWILA BRASE of CITIZENS' COUNCIL FOR HEALTH FREEDOM: http://www.cchfreedom.org/; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Americans need to see “population health” for what it really is. Last week, a POLITICO panel discussed the term “population health,” which is key to Obamacare’s transformation away from the private practice of medicine -- and into the everyday lives of Americans – starting with Medicare.
It begins with the lump sum and bundled payments doctors will be paid by Medicare under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to practice “population health” rather than individualized patient care.
Joshua Sharfstein, M.D., former Maryland Secretary of Health and now Associate Dean for Public Health Practice and Training at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Healthexplained "population health" in two ways.Here’s the first:
I think of population health as the health of a community. That includes the people seeking care and the people not seeking care. … It’s their overall health. … If you go back to when the term “population health” was coined, it was coined to get at some of the non-clinical factors that underlie the health of communities, including access to safe food, access to safe communities, and prevention...This means tracking individuals. Dr. William Borden, M.D., a health policy professor, said algorithms can be used to look for patterns in the community from “patient-reported outcomes” shared through a clinic’s computerized medical record portal, FitBit data, home blood pressure monitors, and more.
The Maryland health information exchange gave a lot of tools to doctors to know what was happening to their patients even if they weren’t seeing them.
But population health is so much more. After being asked to explain the difference between population health and public health, Dr. Sharfstein clarified:
I think population health is the way that health care systems are thinking about public health now. Generally speaking, when people use the term, public health, they’re thinking about public health departments. ... Public health is sometimes seen as for public health people, but when the clinical system gets into public health, they’re talking about population health. I think it’s a very similar concept. It’s the term that people in health care use when they’re doing some of the things that people in public health do.”Translated: Doctors, clinics, hospitals and health plans are being deputized as government agents. To protect yourself from tracking and profiling, opt out of your state’s health information exchange, find a cash-based physician, and refuse to share FitBit data, answer clinic questionnaires, or use the clinic online portal into your medical record. Then demand state legislators enact informed patient consent requirements for all data-sharing.
In freedom,
Twila Brase, RN, PHN
President and Co-founder
P.S. Can you help? We need to raise $84,000 to meet our fundraising goal of at least $125,000 by December 31. There are just 29 days left for year-end giving. Help our CCHF team protect your personal freedom in 2016!! To donate today, please click here!
_______________________________________________________
Doctors can report some mentally ill patients to FBI under new gun control rule
BY DAVID PITTMANSEE: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/obama-gun-control-rule-mental-illness-217340; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Delivering on its promise to deliver "common sense" gun control, the Obama administration on Monday finalized a rule that enables health care providers to report the names of mentally ill patients to an FBI firearms background check system.
The action was one of a series of steps that President Barack Obama had called for in January 2013 in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings to curb gun violence, but the rule was not published until today.
Story Continued Below
While the 1993 Brady law prohibits gun ownership by individuals who have been involuntarily committed, found incompetent to stand trial or otherwise deemed by a court to be a danger to themselves or others, federal health care privacy rules prohibited doctors and other providers from sharing information without the consent of their patients.
Under the rule, which takes effect next month, for the first time health providers can disclose the information to the background check system without legal repercussions.
“The disclosure is restricted to limited demographic and certain other information needed for NICS purposes,” the rule states. Disclosure of diagnostic or clinical information is prohibited.
Paul Gionfriddo, chief executive of the mental health rights advocate Mental Health America, said he believes the White House strikes the right balance between the need to have this information shared with the FBI’s background check system and protecting individuals’ privacy.
Current law allows HIPAA exclusions for law enforcement purposes, but it's a broad exclusion.
“That could be a barn door opened quite wide if an administration really wanted to open it, and they didn’t,” Gionfriddo said. “The administration has taken great pain to try to clarify that there is very limited information that would be reported only within a very limited group.”
Since the Newtown shootings, the number of mental health records submitted to the FBI system has tripled to more than 3 million records, according to an analysis by Everytown for Gun Safety, a group promoting an end to gun violence. The FBI system resulted in more than 6,000 denials of firearm purchases because of mental health criteria.
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
SEE:
OBAMA RULE ALLOWS DOCTORS TO TURN IN GUN OWNERS THEY DECIDE ARE MENTALLY ILL
Many liberals believe all gun owners are mentally ill
SEE: http://www.infowars.com/obama-rule-allows-doctors-to-turn-in-gun-owners-they-decide-are-mentally-ill/; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
So much for patient-doctor confidentiality.
The Obama administration has authorized a rule allowing doctors to turn in patients they deem mentally ill so the government can strip them of their Second Amendment right.
The rule was first proposed in January 2013 following the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, but was not published until today.
According to Paul Gionfriddo, chief executive of the mental health rights advocate Mental Health America, the rule “strikes the right balance” between the need to have this information shared with the FBI’s background check system and protecting individuals’ privacy, Politico reports.
“That could be a barn door opened quite wide if an administration really wanted to open it, and they didn’t,” Gionfriddo said. “The administration has taken great pain to try to clarify that there is very limited information that would be reported only within a very limited group.”
The “common sense” rule takes effect next month.
