Health Care BS

An integral part of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan is a national mandate requiring health care providers to implement Electronic Medical Records. This sounds reasonable enough. Many Republicans are on the same page. Even Newt Gingrich supports the idea.

However, as Peter Barry Chowka points out in Part II of his American Thinker examination of “progressive” health care proposals, the EMR project may not be as innocuous as it sounds:

A major stated purpose of Electronic Medical Records is to amass enough data to enable bureaucrat “experts” chosen by the government to measure “evidence” of medical “outcomes,” and to determine which therapies, drugs, tests, and other procedures are supposedly the most effective, both clinically and in terms of cost.

For those of us old-fashioned enough to think that it’s the physician’s job to “determine” which treatments are “the most effective,” this sounds less than salubrious. But that may not be the worst of it. As Chowka points out in Part I of his analysis, EMRs could amount to a de facto national ID:

If EMRs are adopted, everyone in the country will, by law, be given a unique number, or “identifier,” which will follow the individual from cradle to grave. The identifier, a de facto national ID, will be the key to unlock a treasure trove-a life’s worth of the most private and intimate data having to do with the complete history of a person’s health status and his medical care.

Is all this a little too paranoid? Perhaps. However, before measuring me for a tinfoil hat, consider Senator Clinton’s well-known affinity for central government control. Are you sure that a President Hillary, backed by a Democrat-controlled congress, won’t use the whole EMR in the way Chowka envisions?