Stryker Corporation announced it “will cut 5% of its global workforce by the end of next year to reduce costs in the face of new fees on device makers required by the U.S. health care law,” reports the Detroit Free Press. According to Stryker, “job cuts will reduce annual pretax operating costs by more than [...]

Could a non-profit sell your private medical data to fund the on-going operational cost of the state’s All Payer Claims Database (APCD)? Maybe.
Last week COST detailed the developments in Colorado’s APCD, a state-mandated data warehouse of all your private healthcare transactions.
The Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) spun off the non-profit Center for [...]

At least two national media outlets are concerned enough to report that Obamacare allows the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) access to everyone’s private medical records. According to the Washington Examiner:
America is learning about the federal government’s plan to collect and aggregate confidential patient records for every one of us.
In a proposed rule [...]

Legislative Council staff member Kate Watkins confirmed what the Independence Institute has said all along. Because money is fungible, no one really knows how the Referendum C money was spent.
The Colorado News Agency reported that Watkins recently appeared before the Transportation Legislative Review Committee.  Committee member State Rep Randy Fischer (D-Fort Collins) asked Watkins what happened [...]

As far as personal information goes, medical documents are perhaps among the most important–and also the most closely-held–due to privacy concerns.
When legislators push for compulsory public databases of highly sensitive information, as Colorado did this year with HB10-1330 “All-Payer Database,” the threat of information being disseminated to unknown parties, subject to hacking, or even accidental [...]

To steer away search engine users from site “hostile” to the health care reform bill, as Politico reports (via Gateway Pundit)
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has bought a Google advertisement to steer people searching for “ObamaCare” to a page that is customized to detect searchers’ locations and steer them both to local [...]

The state cannot pay its bills and taxpayers get blamed. And no one asks where did the more than $18 billion in taxpayer dollars go.
The Denver Post reports:
Temporarily short on money, Colorado has declared a fiscal emergency and delayed payments to doctors and clinics taking care of the state’s neediest patients.
The usual suspects are providing [...]

The 2010 Colorado General Assembly passed judgment on 23 pieces of legislation, including one joint resolution, that claim some type of transparency benefit.  Seventeen passed.
Some were great such as Rep. Amy Stephens’ bill requiring transparency for gifts, grants and donations that pay for special interest government and Rep BJ Nikkel’s bill requiring more detailed information [...]

Coloradans are just a senate vote and Governor’s signature away from losing complete control over who has access to their private medical records.  On Friday, HB 1330 the All Payer Database passed out of the Senate Appropriations committee along a party line vote and is headed to the full Senate.
In a March press release Independence [...]

Transparency Czarina Amy Oliver Cooke just sent this press release.  It’s not too early to start grieving for your medical privacy.  Very soon we could be reminiscing about what it like was when our health care records were kept private seen only by ourselves and our doctors unless we gave permission to do otherwise.
FOR IMMEDIATE [...]