The Trump Administration Is Seeking Federal Workers’ Sens...

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The Week in Brief The Trump Administration Is Seeking Federal Workers’ Sensitive Medical Data. By Amanda Seitz About a year ago, I was stationed in downtown D. (yes, really)

On an especially chilly spring day, watching hundreds of federal employees line up outside their office buildings.

The Details

In a humbling exercise, employees were waiting to test whether their entry badges still worked at the Department of Health and Human Services — or whether they’d be walked back out they were among the 10,000 unlucky ones whose jobs had suddenly been eliminated. I thought back to that day just as I researched and reported on a significant, under-the-radar proposal from the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal workers.

According to a notice posted in December, OPM is seeking personally 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.

Why This Matters

Email Sign-Up to KFF Health News free weekly , “The Week in Brief. ” Your Email Address Right now, 65 insurance companies maintain data 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 retaliatory action against some workers and sharing sensitive data across agencies as part of its immigration and fraud crackdowns.

Health experts are weighing in on what this means for people.

The Bottom Line

My colleague Maia Rosenfeld and I wanted to know what lawyers and ethicists who work on health policy issues think about this proposal. On the one hand, sources told us, this sort of detailed data could be used government to improve the largest employer-sponsored health insurance system in the country.

Is this a W or an L? You decide.