The health and welfare services decision to hand over Medicaid data raises privacy concerns. Most state immigrants are already ineligible for Medicaid.
ICE that allows access to Medicaid subscribers’ personal data
The Trump administration is giving ICE a new way to illegally identify people living in the United States by accessing data from people registered with Medicaid.
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WASHINGTON – The U.S. Health Service said it is providing immigrants and customs enforcement officers with access to the personal data of 79 million Medicaid enrollees to help track immigrants who are not legally living in the country.
Giving ice access to Medicaid registrants’ personal data provides another escalation of President Donald Trump’s hard-hit immigration policy. It can also raise privacy concerns under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said data is being shared between the Centers for Medicare Services, the Centers for Medicaid Services and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
“In regards to recent data sharing between CMS and DHS, HHS is fully compliant with all applicable laws to ensure that Medicaid benefits are reserved to individuals entitled to receive them,” the spokesman said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the department is exploring an initiative with CMS to ensure that people living in the country do not receive illegal Medicaid benefits.
The agreement was first reported by the Associated Press on July 17th and signed on July 14th, it said.
The Medicaid Health program, which provides compensation for low-income people, is jointly funded by the federal government and states.
Immigrants who are illegal in the United States are not eligible for Medicaid under federal law, but 14 states and the District of Columbia provide compensation for eligible children regardless of their immigration status, while seven states and the District of Columbia do so for adults.
“CMS is actively cracking down on states that may be misusing federal Medicaid funds to subsidize care for illegal immigrants,” a spokesperson for the HHS said. “This surveillance effort, supported by legitimate inter-agency data sharing with DHS, focuses on identifying waste, fraud and systematic abuse.”
The spokesman did not address questions from Reuters about the type of data being shared or how HHS would ensure HIPAA protection. The AP cited a copy of the data sharing agreement and said the data includes the address and ethnicity of the house.
The agreement is the latest in a series of moves by the Health Bureau in support of Trump’s administration’s crackdown on immigration, a week after expanding interpretation of a law that prohibits most immigrants from receiving public federal benefits.
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein and Kanishka Singh, edited by Daniel Wallis and Rosalba O’Brien)
