Safety Agency Demands Your ER Records, Skipping Law Requiring Public Notice
Every American who walks into an emergency room — for a broken arm, a mental health crisis, a childhood vaccine reaction, or a suicide attempt — could soon have their full identifying medical record routed to a private contractor working for a federal consumer-safety agency that has no statutory authority over any of those conditions, under a program that skipped the federal law requiring public notice before it could begin.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, a small independent watchdog created to track injuries from defective lawn mowers, cribs, and kitchen appliances, has been pressuring hospital executives across the country this year to hand over the identifiable records of every patient who visits their emergency rooms — not just those hurt by consumer products, but every patient, for more than 10,000 diagnostic codes. The campaign, reported this morning by KFF Health News, represents the broadest federal reach into hospital patient records in recent memory, and it was built on two legally contested claims: that the Paperwork Reduction Act’s mandatory public-notice requirement does not apply to a program that has already contacted more than a dozen hospitals, and that an unrelated data-sharing law gives the CPSC the power to penalize hospitals that say no.
This is not a theoretical risk. Between 2017 and 2019, the CPSC improperly released the personal health information of approximately 30,000 people — names, addresses, ages, incident summaries — to outside parties including Consumer Reports. The 30,000 affected individuals were never notified. A Senate investigation found the breach resulted from inadequate training and poor IT management. Now the same agency, operating without its full governing board and having lost nearly one in five career staff members, is building a system designed to collect far more records — from far more people — through a private contractor whose contract with the government has not been made public.
