Stop the National Patient ID

As Congress considers year-end funding, the risk of creating a UNIQUE PATIENT IDENTIFIER (UPI) resurfaces.

A UPI is a single federal number that would be used to track patients and digitally link all the confidential details of a person’s entire health history and medical record together.

This would include diagnoses, medications, confidential conversations with doctors, tests, labs, treatments, behaviors, genetic information, health histories, and the emerging and comprehensive “social determinants of health (SDOH)” data, which are increasingly being gathered in electronic health records (EHRs). SDOH data includes your living arrangements, income, relationships and family members, occupation, education, and much more.

The entire medical record would become an easily accessible DOSSIER on all Americans. It would be available online to countless outsiders nationwide through the eHEALTH EXCHANGE. The eHealth Exchange is a national health data system being built by the federal government to create a distributed database with a network of state health information exchanges (HIEs) and health system HIEs.

NOTE: HIPAA does NOT protect privacy. Despite how it has been portrayed, HIPAA is known as a “permissive data-sharing” rule. The UPI is part of HIPAA.

A NATIONAL PATIENT ID:
• eliminates Americans’ medical privacy rights
• threatens personal autonomy
• makes it nearly impossible to receive an unbiased, fresh second opinion for care
• creates a NATIONAL SECURITY RISK by offering hackers and foreign governments, such as Russia, China and North Korea, a rich target of Internet-accessible data on all Americans

The UPI has been stopped each year for more than two decades by restrictive language in the appropriations bills, written by U.S. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) and U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). The language has long prohibited the establishment and funding of the UPI. But that protective language has yet to be added by Democrat leadership in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, which plan to pass the bill by the end of this year.

URGENT ACTION NEEDED: Please contact the members of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and your U.S. Senators and ask them to uphold the long-standing BAN on the establishment of and funding for the UPI.

PHONE CALLS are best because they cannot be ignored, but please send your request to them by email and social media. Thank you!