07/28/2026
Legislation
Mark Silverstein, Chapter Chairperson
Last month I mentioned OPM's (Office of Personnel Management), desire to collect medical information, including prescriptions, from the records of federal and postal employees and retirees in an effort to investigate fraud. It seems the administration believes the Federal Employee Health Benefits (FEHB) and the Postal Service Health Benefits (PSHB) programs are filled with fraud being conducted by both the medical providers and the subscribers. When pressed for instances of such fraud committed by a worker, retiree, or relative, the General Counsel for OPM was unable to name any, but did insist that healthcare fraud does occur.
In response to the privacy concerns raised by several Congressional representatives, OPM has stated names, addresses, and social security numbers will be removed from the data before it is reviewed by analysts. Birth years will NOT be removed. The technical staff will also receive member IDs, but they will be scrambled into other unique numbers before they are released to other staffers. OPM says they retain the right to go back and re-identify records. The collection of data can now begin at any time. An additional wrinkle is that OPM now says they want to also examine records kept by Medicare, which retirees use along with FEHB and PSHB.So does this response meet the privacy concerns raised by both NARFE and the Congress? According to CBS News, health privacy lawyers say OPM's response of pseudonymizing the workers details is a step in the right direction, but may not be enough to preserve privacy. CBS quoted Matt Fisher, a health privacy lawyer, who said OPM is mostly complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) but he pointed out that the member ID can still identify the worker. As he told CBS, "The described process arguably comes down to trusting internal controls in OPM to ensure that data is walled off as proposed. The ideal would be for only truly de-identified information to be shared in the first place."
In other words, it could be a lot better, but at least we now have a better picture of how they intend to handle our medical data.
