Reconsidering Private Pay for Counseling
In my opinion, counseling records should be held to a highest standard of privacy of all health records. It is much more damaging to a person to publicly reveal a history of affairs, suicide attempts, psychosis, alcohol and drug abuse than it is to reveal a list of recent lab values and blood pressure readings. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA was created to protect the privacy of health records. Unfortunately, HIPAA laws are sometimes broken in a very big way. On March 11, 2013, Robert Barnes, a Malibu lawyer filed in the Superior Court of San Diego charging that IRS agents seized 60 million electronic health care records of Americans belonging to 10 million US Citizens. These records included psychological counseling and sexual and drug treatment. This IRS medical record seizure was so massive that it affected approximately one out of every twenty five adults. The IRS agents, who were only authorized to take financial tax-related information instead threatened to “rip” the servers containing the medical records if the IT Department at a large insurance company did not voluntarily hand these over. This happened in 2011. The 2013 suit is asking that the records be returned and to expunge them from government databases. Why have these records been in a federal government database since 2011? Who has viewed these records over the past two and a half years? Where are these records now? Have these records been transferred to other databases? Lots of unanswered questions! This makes me want to change over to a completely private pay system instead of filing with insurance companies. There is already too much discrimination involved with mental health and substance abuse. This lack of privacy makes mental illness discrimination far worse. I think counseling should be between the counselor and the client only. Now one in twenty five Americans have their private health information on a national database. I support private pay to keep counseling private.