Americans’ Medicaid Data Is Now a Government Surveillance Search Tool

​“The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.”

U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977

To try to find people in the United States illegally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) directed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to comply with its request to sift through the health data of 79 million Medicaid recipients. This includes giving DHS access to sensitive personal information, including addresses, birthdates, ethnicity, IP addresses, banking data, immigration status, and Social Security numbers.

Twenty states have sued in response, arguing that giving DHS access to such personal data violates privacy protections under multiple federal laws, including the Administrative Procedures Act, the Social Security Act, HIPAA, and, of course, the Privacy Act.

Several civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EPIC, and Protect Democracy Project, have filed an amicus brief in that case.

• In June, the deputy director of Medicaid protested the DHS plan in a memo: “Multiple federal statutory and regulatory authorities do not permit CMS to share this information with entities outside of CMS.”

 

• The ACLU’s Cody Venzke told Wired the move was tantamount to Medicaid “being entirely repurposed as a law enforcement database,” prompting the magazine’s writers to observe that the current plan “seemingly involves vacuuming up data from across the government.”

Our own take is that this is the weaponization of data, a characterization articulated by many others. The thing about weapons, of course, is that they can be pointed in any direction. Today it’s illegal aliens. Next time, it could just as easily be wealthy taxpayers, political dissenters, or those who engage in unpopular speech. Orange County official Jose Serrano told the L.A. Times that such targeting is dangerous because “the information is being used against people.”
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In other words, it could be used for any reason by this or a future administration against you.

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