Claim: The IRS is going to be "in charge" of "a huge national database" on health care that will include Americans’ "personal, intimate, most close-to-the-vest-secrets.
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Americans for Tax Reform
text: IRS has not been safeguarding federal tax information properly. The tax information is gathered by the IRS from the tax returns filed in the United States. The IRS provides confidential information to over 280 federal, state and local agencies. According to this TIGTA report the IRS's Internal Revenue Manual does not require on-site validation of an agency's ability to protect federal tax information and does not set any guidelines for an agency's background investigation for accessing this information. The TIGTA report surveyed 15 agencies that receive federal tax information and found that none of them conducted sufficient background checks on

title: Internal Revenue Service
text: several months. By providing Social Security Numbers and other information obtained from prior computer crimes, the criminals were able to use the IRS's online "Get Transcript" function to have the IRS provide them with the tax returns and other private information of American tax filers. On August 17, 2015, IRS disclosed that the breach had compromised an additional 220,000 taxpayer records. On February 27, 2016, the IRS disclosed that more than 700,000 social security numbers and other sensitive information had been stolen. Internal Revenue Service The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service of the United States federal government.

title: HealthCare.gov
text: of their privacy policies, contracts for third-party tools and URL construction. He said that Healthcare.gov had encrypted a URL that contains data on users’ income and age, and whether they were pregnant. On Jan. 20, 2015, the Associated Press reported in an article titled: "Government health care website quietly sharing personal data" that HealthCare.gov is providing access to enrollees' personal data to private companies that specialize in advertising. The data may include age, income, ZIP code, whether a person smokes, and if a person is pregnant. It may also include a computer's Internet address, which can identify a person's name

title: Betsy McCaughey
text: Act, hidden provisions that would harm the health of Americans as well as the healthcare sector of the economy. She argued that the bill would establish two powerful new bureaucracies: the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. McCaughey said the National Coordinator would monitor patients' electronic medical records to ensure that doctors and hospitals treated patients in a way that "the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective" and that doctors and hospitals deviating from the government's "electronically delivered protocols" would be penalized. She said that the Federal Coordinating Council would

title: HealthCare.gov
text: was plagued with security concerns and lead to information security experts publicly testifying before the Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology and others speaking to the government about security vulnerabilities in healthcare.gov. David Kennedy was able to locate 70,000 health records that were supposed to be private, but were publicly available via a google dork. There are concerns that personal information put into the website may not be secure in the way that users expect: on January 24, 2015 Kevin Counihan, the C.E.O. of Healthcare.gov, addressed concerns about privacy on the federal website. He said they launched a review

title: Electronic health records in the United States
text: University Professor Jacob M. Appel, has claimed that the number of people who will need to have access to such a truly interoperable national system, which he estimates to be 12 million, will inevitable lead to breaches of privacy on a massive scale. Appel has written that while "hospitals keep careful tabs on who accesses the charts of VIP patients," they are powerless to act against "a meddlesome pharmacist in Alaska" who "looks up the urine toxicology on his daughter's fiance in Florida, to check if the fellow has a cocaine habit." This is a significant barrier for the adoption

title: Exchange Information Disclosure Act
text: Leader Eric Cantor announced that the bill would be on the schedule for the week of January 6, 2014. Supporters of the bill argue that it would help Congress and the American people judge and follow the progress of the ACA. Republicans argue that the bill is necessary because the Obama Administration has refused to provide information about usage of healthcare.gov and enrollment in new health insurance plans. Heritage Action notes that the bill is "designed to increase transparency in the operation of American Health Benefits Exchanges" in response to security and transparency failures, but believes "the only acceptable solution

title: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
text: run their own exchanges, which have signed up around 3 million additional people. The IRS announced that it would not require that tax returns indicate that a person has health insurance, reducing the effectiveness of the individual mandate, in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump. The CBO reported in March that the healthcare exchanges were expected to be stable. In May the United States House of Representatives voted to repeal the ACA using the American Health Care Act of 2017. The individual mandate was repealed starting in 2019 via the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017".

title: Internal Revenue Service
text: Internal Revenue Service The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service of the United States federal government. The government agency is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and is under the immediate direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, who is appointed to a five-year term by the President of the United States. The IRS is responsible for collecting taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of federal statutory tax law of the United States. The duties of the IRS include providing tax assistance to taxpayers and pursuing and resolving instances of erroneous or

title: Federal Data Services Hub
text: and state Medicaid administrations. Data will include: Federal Data Services Hub The Federal Data Services Hub is a tool used to facilitate the government-backed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act health coverage program. It is built by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Health and Human Services (HHS). It combines data on income and employment from IRS records, health and entitlements from HHS records, identity from Social Security, citizenship from Department of Homeland Security records, criminality from Department of Justice records, and residency from state records. Also involved will be the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the

title: United States Census Bureau
text: an affidavit of non-disclosure prior to employment. The Bureau cannot share responses, addresses or personal information with anyone including United States or foreign government and law enforcement agencies such as the IRS or the FBI or Interpol. "Providing quality data, for public good—while respecting individual privacy and, at the same time, protecting confidentiality—is the Census Bureau's core responsibility", "Keeping the public's trust is critical to the Census's ability to carry out the mission as the leading source of quality data about the Nation's people and economy." Only after 72 years does the information collected become available to other agencies or

title: National Practitioner Data Bank
text: this information in the NPDB. The Data Bank was created by Congress with the primary goals of improving health care quality, protecting the public and reducing health care fraud and abuse. The Data Bank is managed by the Bureau of Health Workforce of the Health Resources and Services Administration in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Before May 6, 2013, the Data Bank comprised the National Practitioner Data Bank and the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank. The two were consolidated by Section 6403 of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, Public Law 111-148. In enacting, the National

title: Data mining
text: US Congress via the passage of regulatory controls such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The HIPAA requires individuals to give their "informed consent" regarding information they provide and its intended present and future uses. According to an article in "Biotech Business Week", "'[i]n practice, HIPAA may not offer any greater protection than the longstanding regulations in the research arena,' says the AAHC. More importantly, the rule's goal of protection through informed consent is approach a level of incomprehensibility to average individuals." This underscores the necessity for data anonymity in data aggregation and mining practices. U.S. information

title: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
text: The launch for both the state and federal exchanges was troubled due to management and technical failings. HealthCare.gov, the website that offers insurance through the exchanges operated by the federal government, crashed on opening and suffered endless problems. Operations stabilized in 2014, although not all planned features were complete. The Government Accountability Office released a non-partisan study in 2014 that concluded that the administration did not provide "effective planning or oversight practices" in developing the ACA website. In "Burwell v. Hobby Lobby" the Supreme Court exempted closely held corporations with religious convictions from the contraception rule. At the beginning of

title: IRS targeting controversy
text: tax code damaged its primary function: an apolitical tax collector that Americans can trust to treat them fairly." The report was criticized by Rep. Cummings as "cherry-picked" to support a political narrative. The report did not link the IRS's conduct to coordination with the White House, though Republicans stressed that the investigation is ongoing and will continue in the next Congress. In January 2015, the United States Senate requested that the White House produce all communications it has had with the IRS since 2010. On August 5, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee released Senate Report 114-119, "The Internal Revenue Service's

title: Freedom of information in the United States
text: only in those cases where the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would be harmful to an interest protected by that exemption". It encouraged all government agencies to review FOIA requests in a manner most favorable to openness and to release information, even though it might fall within one of the nine exemption categories, if no "foreseeable harm" would result from the disclosure. The goal was to achieve the "maximum responsible disclosure". On October 12, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a policy memorandum on FOIA to all federal executive agencies. The AG declared the Department of Justice (DOJ) would defend

title: Nina E. Olson
text: IRS service is deteriorating to unprecedented poor levels in all aspects of its work, mainly in pre-filing and filing activities but also in its enforcement activities. Congress has removed 17 percent from the IRS budget since fiscal 2010 when adjusted for inflation while the agency is dealing with more tax returns than ever before. Each year the IRS answers phone calls from about 100 million people, and in 2015 they are also implementing Obamacare. Nina E. Olson Nina E. Olson is the United States Taxpayer Advocate, and head of the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate, a government office dedicated to

title: Electronic health records in the United States
text: parties. Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; or to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person. Medical and health care providers experienced 767 security breaches resulting in the compromised confidential health information of 23,625,933 patients during the period of 2006–2012. One major issue that has risen on the privacy of the US network for electronic health records is the strategy to secure the privacy of patients. Former US president George W. Bush called for

title: Citizens for Self-Governance
text: a federal judge ordered the IRS to turn over the list of 298 groups it had targeted for intrusive scrutiny. The IRS failed to turn over the list, filing a petition for a writ of mandamus from the appellate court so that it would not have to disclose information on groups the agency had targeted. In March 2016, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a unanimous ruling rebuking the IRS and giving the agency two weeks to produce the names of organizations it targeted based on their political leanings. In August

title: IT law
text: the DoHS. The Secretary of Homeland Security must "appoint a senior official to assume primary responsibility for privacy policy." This privacy official's responsibilities include but are not limited to: ensuring compliance with the Privacy Act of 1974, evaluating "legislative and regulatory proposals involving the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information by the Federal Government", while also preparing an annual report to Congress.<br> For more information see: Homeland Security Act -This Act mandates that intelligence be "provided in its most shareable form" that the heads of intelligence agencies and federal departments "promote a culture of information sharing." The IRTPA also