***News Release***
‘Big Brother in the Exam Room’ Now Available! New Book from Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom Gives Action Steps for Restoring Freedom
Health Care Industry Leaders Give Words of Praise for Twila Brase’s Work; Call the Author ‘Deft and Fearless’ as She ‘Sounds the Alarm’
PAUL, Minn.—Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF) has released a new, groundbreaking book that could change the way both patients and doctors think about the exam room experience.
Written by CCHF president and co-founder Twila Brase, RN, PHN, and published by Beaver’s Pond Press, “Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth About Electronic Health Records” exposes how the mandated, government-certified electronic health record (EHR) technology (CEHRT) has negatively affected doctors and patients.
Brase’s extensively researched work shows how and why Congress forced doctors and hospitals to install a data-collecting, command and control surveillance system in the exam room. It also includes the impact of EHRs on privacy, patient care, costs, patient safety and more, according to doctors and more than 125 studies.
“In 2009, Congress mandated the use of government-certified EHRs, which means the EHR is built not to improve patient care but to do what the government wants it to do: government reporting, patient and doctor profiling, data analytics, health services research, linking to a national medical-records system, population health, standardized treatment protocols, compliance tracking and much more,” Brase said. “The government calls this Meaningful Use of the EHR. Doctors and hospitals that refuse to install a government-certified EHR and refuse to demonstrate Meaningful Use receive reduced Medicare payments. As a result, this surveillance technology is now present in virtually every doctor’s office and every hospital room.
“Patients face this intrusive system because they don’t pay their own medical bills,” she continued. “Third parties—the government, employers and health plans—pay for most medical care. America’s third-party payer system began with employer-sponsored coverage in the 1940s and expanded into Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare and more. As Americans handed over their responsibility for medical bills to third parties they gradually lost choices, privacy, control and freedom. The payers, not the patients, hold the purse strings and the power. These third parties do not have the same interest in the patient’s health, recovery and quality of life as the patient does. As a friend of mine once quipped, ‘If someone else who doesn’t love you is in charge of buying your food for the rest of your life, you will eat much differently than if you buy it on your own.’ In short, ‘He who pays the piper picks the tune.’”
Many leaders in the health care industry have provided words of high praise for “Big Brother in the Exam Room,” now available at Amazon.com and www.BigBrotherInTheExamRoom.com.
- “‘Big Brother in the Exam Room’ is what happens when the federal government pays for over half of the health care in the U.S. As the responsible party for the majority of health care, the government gets to decide how much they’re willing to pay for care, where it can be delivered, and by whom, and the ‘hoops that must be jumped through’ for doctors to participate and to get paid. Every regulation and every federal requirement that gets between patients and their doctors, such as electronic medical records, brings us one step closer to a single-payer system and one step further away from individual freedom over health care decisions by patients.”—Hal Scherz, MD, founder of Docs 4 Patient Care and secretary of the Docs 4 Patient Care Foundation
- “Brase shines a bright light on how the government foisted electronic health records (EHRs) onto the health care system to further control the practice of medicine, subordinating individualized patient care. ‘Big Brother in the Exam Room’ is a must-read for anyone who cares about physician autonomy and patient care.”—Naomi Lopez Bauman, director of health care policy, Goldwater Institute
- “‘Big Brother in the Exam Room’ reads like a real-life version of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ or ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ It’s a chilling tale of steady encroachments on freedom and privacy, tending toward the suppression of the doctor-patient relationship itself. It’s a handbook for medical subversives, optimistic citizens determined to preserve a genuinely human art of healing in a world overrun with bureaucratic centralizers and idiot systematizers. In these deftly researched pages, we glimpse a future in which physicians are mere cogs and patients an afterthought. Happily, the story doesn’t end there. The deft and fearless Ms. Brase offers a message of hope and an outline of sanity.—Dean Clancy, former senior health policy adviser in Congress and the White House
- “Twila Brase has been sounding the alarm about the perils of government data dredging at least since the HIPAA ‘Privacy’ Rule was enacted. ‘Big Brother in the Exam Room’ shows how the EHR, while destroying privacy, also has the opposite of the promised effects on efficiency, reliable record-keeping and clinical errors. EHRs are clearly a danger to your health as well as your doctor’s mental health.—Jane Orient, MD, executive director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
- “Through meticulous research and the full range of sources, Twila Brase has made a very important contribution to the field of health care policy. Doctors, patients, and all who believe knowing how their private health care information is being collected and used is important need to read ‘Big Brother in the Exam Room.’—Eric Novack, MD, orthopedic surgeon and chairman, U.S. Health Freedom Coalition
For more information about CCHF, visit www.cchfreedom.org, its Facebook page or its Twitter feed @CCHFreedom. Read more about “Big Brother in the Exam Room” here, and view the media page for CCHF here. For more about CCHF’s free-market, cash-based care initiative, The Wedge of Health Freedom, visit www.JointheWedge.com, The Wedge Facebook page or follow The Wedge on Twitter @wedgeoffreedom.
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