1. United States
2. Ariz.
3. Letter

Stop the HHS plan to collect identifiable medical records on 90% of Americans. The Department of Health and Human Services is paying state health exchanges $3 per person to hand over private patient data, with a target of reaching most of the country's medical histories by 2028. That is a staggering federal overreach, and it raises serious HIPAA concerns that demand your immediate attention. The stated justification — investigating a vaccine-autism link — is not supported by science. Decades of research have flatly rejected it. Former CDC official Daniel Jernigan has noted the government has limited legal authority to access these state records in the first place. Nebraska is already entangled in this: our state health department received $18.7 million in CDC funding last year, and CyncHealth was awarded $13.6 million in contracts described as a "proof-of-concept" for this data collection effort. Our constituents' most sensitive health information should not be a test case for a politically driven fishing expedition. Push back on this now.