Trump admin makes sweeping request for #medicalrecords of federal workers
The unprecedented proposal would give the Trump admin access to doctors’ notes.
#ArsTechnica

The unprecedented proposal was quietly revealed in a short notice from the Office of Personnel Management in December, KFF notes. OPM said it is seeking “service use and cost data,” which would be harvested from medical records such as “medical claims, pharmacy claims, encounter data, and provider data.”

That list could give the federal government access to prescriptions employees have filled and their diagnoses, as well as provider information, doctors’ notes, treatments, and visit summaries, among other sensitive health information. The collection would affect more than 8 million Americans and harvest data from 65 insurance companies, according to KFF.

They clearly want to feed everything they can get their hands on into one or more LLMs to analyze, and it’s impossible to effectively anonymize the data they need to produce the reports they want.

Other experts expressed concern over how the Trump administration could use the data, with fears including potential political retaliation or targeting of workers who sought certain medical care, such as abortion or transgender care. They also note that there isn’t any stated safeguards on how the data will be handled.

Absolutely, once it’s been fed into an LLM there are all kinds of ugly questions that can asked. Usually at this point in such a story we need to stretch a little to imagine an unfriendly future government that might abuse the trust that was inherited from a past government, to use power responsibly. I don’t think we need to stretch very much right now. This is an offensively invasive terrible idea for everyone but the oligarchs, even if most of the red team doesn’t understand that it’s against their interests.

If this play works out then eventually they’ll come for Medicare records. Then the denials increase. Look ma, it’s cost saving!