About a year ago, I was stationed in downtown D.C. on an especially chilly spring day, watching hundreds of federal\u00a0employees\u00a0line up outside their office buildings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a humbling exercise, employees were waiting to test whether their entry badges still worked at the Department of Health and Human Services \u2014 or whether they\u2019d be walked back out by security because they were among the 10,000 unlucky ones whose jobs had suddenly been eliminated.<\/p>\n
I thought back to that day recently as I researched and\u00a0reported on\u00a0a significant, under-the-radar proposal from the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to a\u00a0notice posted<\/a>\u00a0in December, OPM is\u00a0seeking\u00a0personally identifiable medical and pharmaceutical claims information on federal employees and retirees, as well as their family members, who are enrolled in the Federal Employees Health Benefits or Postal Service Health Benefits programs. Just over 8 million Americans get coverage through such plans.<\/p>\n Right now, 65 insurance companies\u00a0maintain\u00a0data the agency wants, including information on prescriptions, diagnoses, and treatments. That would put a tremendous amount of personal information about federal employees in the hands of an administration that has earned a reputation for taking\u00a0retaliatory action<\/a>\u00a0against some workers and\u00a0sharing sensitive data<\/a>\u00a0across agencies as part of its immigration and fraud crackdowns.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n My colleague Maia Rosenfeld and I wanted to know what lawyers and ethicists who work on health policy issues think about this proposal.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n On the one hand, sources told\u00a0us,\u00a0this sort of detailed data could be used by the federal government to improve the largest employer-sponsored health insurance system in the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n But doubts about the Trump administration\u2019s motives percolated through every conversation we had.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe concern here is the more information they have, they\u00a0could use it to discipline or target people who are not cooperating politically,\u201d Sharona Hoffman, a health law ethicist at Case Western Reserve University, told me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And, though the notice states that insurers are legally\u00a0permitted\u00a0to\u00a0disclose\u00a0\u201cprotected health information\u201d to the agency for \u201coversight,\u201d Hoffman and others raised questions about OPM\u2019s access to such a sweeping database of medical records under federal health privacy laws.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Insurance companies \u2014 several of which declined to comment \u2014 would have to provide monthly reports to OPM with data on their members. One insurer, CVS Health, said in a public comment that insurers would be breaking the law by providing the information for OPM\u2019s \u201cvague and broad general purposes.\u201d The association that\u00a0represents\u00a0many of those companies also has voiced objections to the proposal, which has not yet been\u00a0finalized.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n OPM spokespeople did not respond to our repeated requests for comment.<\/p>\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/p>\nUSE OUR CONTENT<\/h3>\n