Electronic Health Records for Everyone, Whether You Want Them or Not

I have been writing a few articles in the short time, I've touched on such light and airy topics since immigration reform. At this moment, I thought I would offer some thoughts on how the federal government seemingly wants to know every last detail about your health in an easy to digest electronic format.

In case you haven't heard, the Department of Health and Human Services  announced new regulations on Wednesday that lay out new federal specifications for electronic health records . These EHRs will be required for all Americans by early 2015. As you may or may not recall, the thought of an EHR was first brought to light with the passage of last year's stimulus bill, better known since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

At the time of its passage, ARRA was to allocate roughly $20 billion to establish the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and, according to CNSNews.com on Feb. 11, 2009, would include "a provision creating a federal database" of EHRs. Well sure I'm completely comfortable with something like this, because at least we know our records will be safe, and we can rest easy knowing that they couldn't possibly be compromised by, say, highly ambitious hackers or Russian spies. Our secrets are 100 percent safe, boy howdy.

To borrow a line from Dennis Miller, "Now I don't want to get off on a rant here," but the thought that the Obama administration wants to store my medical records in a few sort of federal government database makes me more nervous than an incontinent Chihuahua strapped to a vibrating massage chair. Keep in brain that we're talking about the similar federal government that has given us the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiasco, nearly 10 percent unemployment when it was assured it wouldn't rise above 8 percent, and Joe Biden. I'd trust the Barefoot Bandit as the head of security at a car dealership before I'd have even the most fleeting thought of trusting a few federal "coordinator" stooge to keep any of my health records, electronic or otherwise.

I'll at least go as far as saying that I actually know lots of the reasons for an HER after I have said that, based on another CNSNews.com is one of them report from July 16, they are "engineered to be easily transferable among different doctors and hospitals in order to eliminate the creation of duplicate or different records among different health care providers" Fine, I get it, but here's a little kicker: the same July 17 report also goes on to state which any medical providers or facilities that don't necessarily want to go along with the federal database will be penalized.