Health Care, RFIDs and Politics

Quite a lot of people hate “Obamacare” which is otherwise known as the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act. And there are indeed things to hate about the law. For example, I am a proponent of single payer health insurance and so the “individual mandate,” where people are required to purchase insurance on their own or pay a “tax” or a “fee” or whatever you want to call it, is problematic to me. I would prefer that we be completely up front about things and build the payment for health care into our tax law. Yes, I know that makes me a “socialist” but I think health care is kind of like fire fighting. Do we want to go back to the days of private fire fighters, where you had to pay up front or the fire fighters wouldn’t show up at your house? Fire fighting is something that we should all contribute to via our tax dollars and then when we need it, the service is provided. If that’s “socialism,” then yes, I am for socialized medicine.

As I said, I believe there are things to complain about and criticize in the Affordable Care Act. But it was quite surprising to me that one of my FB friends posted a link to a video claiming that the Affordable Care Act mandates that we all be implanted with RFID chips with our health information by March 23, 2013. I had not heard of this mandate, despite the fact that I have been paying pretty close attention to the debate. I would have serious problems with such a mandate but there were several things about the claim that immediately made me suspect it was a figment of someone’s imagination. If you can bear to watch the video, here‘s a short version of it. But for those of you who can’t bear to watch the video, I’ll describe it.

The video begins with an advertisement from a company that makes implantable radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. These are chips that many of us already possess on our ATM cards or passports. The chips contain information of some sort that can be read with a special device that picks up the radio signals emitted by the chip on the card. There are companies that make versions of these chips that can be implanted under the skin of a human or an animal. Some pet owners may have implanted them into their dogs or cats in case the pet gets lost. In any case, the video starts with an ad for these implantable chips and then claims that the Affordable Care Act requires that everyone in the US be implanted with one of these by March 23, 2012. The evidence? The narrator reads a passage (claiming it comes from the law itself) that discuss the creation of a government database to keep track of devices that have been implanted into humans. Then the narrator reads another passage that mandates the creation of a system within hospitals and doctors’ offices that will allow medical information to be stored on and read from RFIDs. These passages say that these two systems must be in place by 36 months from the passage of the law. That’s where the narrator gets March 23, 2013–that is 36 months after the passage of the law.

The thing to notice about these passages is that they say nothing about forcing the implantation of RFID chips. A database to keep track of devices that have been implanted in humans would keep track of things like pace-makers and hip replacements and all kinds of devices that are implanted voluntarily and for the improvement of someone’s life. And we already use RFIDs to keep track of personal information, such as financial information or passport information. These RFIDs are embedded in cards that we carry around with us and the passage that the narrator reads simply suggests that we need a system that would allow medical information to be stored on RFIDs, presumably embedded in cards similar to a credit card or a passport. There is nothing about mandating the implantation of an RFID. Here’s what Snopes has to say about this particular conspiracy theory–note that their evaluation is that there is no truth to the claim.

When there are real things to criticize in this law, why would someone make up a threat such as this? I think it’s because it works. It plays on an emotional response in ways that the real issues do not. And so you get lots more people to care about what is admittedly a scary idea than you would ever get to care about the real problems with the law. So people who would probably not pay attention to the health care debate otherwise are now vehemently against the government intruding on our medical privacy in this way, despite the fact that there is no evidence that the government plans to intrude in this way. So lots of people who would actually benefit from the provisions of the Affordable Care Act are vehemently opposed to the law for reasons that have nothing to do with the reality of the law. And no amount of debunking will make these untruths go away. Just ask the American public whether the US ever found evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.