Daschle received speaking fees from groups opposing patient privacy

Tom Daschle, President Obama's nominee for secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, received speaking fees last year from two organizations that are aligned with health industry groups that opposed strong patient privacy protections in the health care section of the stimulus bill passed by the House last week and now under consideration by the Senate.

Daschle received speaking fees in 2008 from Premier Inc., which collects and analyzes clinical and financial data for hospitals, and America's Health Insurance Plans, an association that represents 1,300 health insurers, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Premier and America's Health Insurance Plans belong to the Confidentiality Coalition, which sent a letter in December to Senate and House leadership opposing plans to include in the economic stimulus bill provisions that would protect the privacy of patients. The bill includes $20 billion for promoting transforming American's paper health records to electronic form to reduce costs and improve health care.

Daschle's law firm, Alston and Bird, also represented CVS Caremark Inc., which operates a national drugstore chain and a pharmacy benefits management division. CVS belongs to the Healthcare Leadership Council, a coalition of chief executives from hospitals, insurers and drug companies, and also is a member of the Confidentiality Coalition.

The coalition, in its letter to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said, "Among those proposals on which we have previously registered, our utmost concerns" about the health information technology in the stimulus package include:

*Informing patients of disclosure of personal health information;

*Any condition for users of electronic health information to require obtaining patient consent for such disclosures;

*Requiring doctors, insurance companies and insurance plans to notify patients of all breaches of personal health information "whether or not the breach poses a reasonable risk of personal harm;"

*A new right for state attorney generals to enforce Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act privacy rules.

Deborah Peel, who founded Patient Privacy Rights, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas, that works to ensure medical information remains restricted, said the Confidentiality Coalition's privacy rights position "paves the way for a gold mine of information that can be used to increase profits, [and] promote expensive -- not necessarily more effective -- drugs."

The group urged that all the protections in the health IT section of the stimulus bill passed by the House remain in the final version of the bill.

Jenny Backus, a spokeswoman for Daschle, did not return an e-mail from Nextgov requesting comment.