Please sign this petition regarding the offshoring of medical records.

This isn't just about "jobs" or American
jobs, this is a bigger issue. Right now there are NO
pending actions or legislation that prohibits any
company (healthcare or otherwise) from sending personal
information overseas. That's right, your physician, your
employer or your insurance company could very well be
sending YOUR personal information overseas! Foreign
countries are NOT governed by US Privacy or HIPAA law.
What does that mean? Simply put, it means once your
personal information leaves the U.S. it leaves US, THE
CONSUMER exposed to such things as fraud and identity
theft!

It is bad enough that offshore companies
are stealing American jobs, but our personal information
and the right to KNOW where it goes is the issue on the
front Line.

IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW
WHERE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION IS
GOING.....................SUPPORT OUR CAUSE!

H.R. 427 has been sent to the House of Committee on Financial Services on 1/9/2009. This Act will require notification to American's BEFORE outsourcing Personal Information.

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A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients' confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients' records attached.

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The Pakistani woman's threat was withdrawn only after she received hundreds of dollars from another person indirectly caught up in the extortion attempt.

The $20 billion medical-transcription business handles dictation from doctors relating to all aspects of the health-care process, from routine exams to surgical procedures. Patients' full medical histories often are included in transcribed reports.

While it's impossible to know for sure how much of the work is heading overseas, the American Association for Medical Transcription, an industry group, estimates that about 10 percent of all U.S. medical transcription is being done abroad.

For two decades, UCSF has outsourced a portion of its transcription work to Transcription Stat. Kim Kaneko, the owner of the Sausalito firm, said she maintains a network of 15 subcontractors throughout the country to handle the "hundreds of files a day" received by her office.

One of those subcontractors is a Florida woman named Sonya Newburn, whom Kaneko said she'd been using steadily for about a year and a half. Kaneko knew that Newburn herself used subcontractors but assumed that was as far as it went.

What Kaneko said she didn't know is that one of Newburn's transcribers, a Texas man named Tom Spires, had his own network of subcontractors. One of these, apparently, was a Pakistani woman named Lubna Baloch.

On Oct. 7, UCSF officials received an e-mail from Baloch, who described herself as "a medical doctor by profession." She said Spires owed her money and had cut off all communication. Baloch demanded that UCSF find Spires and remedy the situation.

She wrote: "Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed, so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet."