Crosstalk: September 18, 2018

​​Twila Brase is the president and co-founder of Citizen’s Council for Health Freedom.  She's a certified public health nurse, has provided testimony before state legislative bodies and she provides daily commentary on the Health Freedom Minute.  She's the author of 'Big Brother in the Exam Room:  The Dangerous Truth about Electronic Health Records'.

According to Twila, there are serious dangers lurking behind the government’s $30 billion electronic health record experiment. She says this omnipresent technology turns doctors into data clerks and shifts attention from patients to paperwork, while health plans, government agencies, and the health data industry profit. Patients who think they are protected by the HIPAA privacy rule will be shocked to discover their medical records are an open book.

According to Twila, back when Hillary Clinton had her plan, she wanted to have a national major electronic health records system. While that never came about, part of her bill, which never passed, was called, 'Administrative Simplification'. That ended up being part of the law of that we now know as HIPAA. It was to take away the privacy and consent rights of individuals so that such information could be digitized and shared.

Once HIPAA was passed, the move was now on to place everyone's data into an electronic format. Then in 2009, 4 weeks after President Obama was inaugurated, they passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This huge bill also included something called the 'High Tech Act'. This was the 'Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act'. The act mandated that doctors and hospitals put in a government approved electronic health records system. The system was to be used meaningfully (the way the government wanted it used) otherwise access to full payment for Medicare patients would be lost.

There were government health record systems before this, but those were made by doctors for doctors and useful for patients. That's not what the government electronic health records system is for. Nonetheless, the government EHR was mandated, so by January of 2014 everyone had to have it in their offices and bedside in order to become fully paid for Medicare patients.

She described how the Illinois Pain Institute took a vote of their staff and they decided to get rid of it and went back to paper. Now Twila is hearing from some doctors that there are extra costs tied to the EHR system, so it would be better in the long run to get rid of it and take the Medicare penalty for refusing to use it.

​When you review this broadcast, you'll find out if the current EHR system has harmed anyone, why Twila believes your data is a tool of control, how this is affecting physicians, the ransomware factor, listener questions, and more.