If you work for the federal government anyway. (And probably everyone else eventually.)
A brief notice from the Office of Personnel Management could dramatically change which personally identifiable medical information the agency obtains, giving it the power to see prescriptions employees had filled or what treatment they sought from doctors. The regulation would require 65 insurance companies that cover more than 8 million Americans — including federal workers, retired members of Congress, mail carriers, and their immediate family members — to provide monthly reports to OPM with identifiable health data on their members.
The proposal is prompting unease from insurers as well as health policy and legal experts, who are concerned about the legality of OPM acquiring such a sweeping database of sensitive health information, and the agency’s ability to safeguard it.
[…]
The ask comes a year into a Republican administration that has been defined by haphazard mass layoffs and firings of thousands of federal workers, including dozens who say they were targeted in acts of political retaliation or for not embracing the White House’s agenda. Under President Donald Trump, the government has also routinely tested the legal bounds of sharing sensitive and personally identifiable tax or health information across government agencies in its efforts to carry out mass immigration arrests or pursue identify fraud.
“You can anticipate a scenario where this information on 8 million Americans is now in the hands of OPM and there’s a real concern of how they use it,” said Michael Martinez, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, an advocacy organization that filed a public comment opposing OPM’s proposal in February. Martinez previously worked at OPM.
There is simply no doubt that they will misuse the data. That’s what they do.
The last I heard, HIPAA precludes anyone from sharing this information but we know that the law doesn’t apply to the Trump administration so never mind.
Hopefully, the courts will stop this too. But you never know.