Providing Amounts for Further Expenses of the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the One Hundred Fourteenth Congress

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACK. Madam Speaker, one of the striking discoveries we have made in this investigation has been the sheer number of laws implicated by the troubling actions of abortion providers, tissue procurement businesses, and researchers. One such law is the HIPAA privacy rule.

The panel's investigation uncovered a series of business contracts between StemExpress, which is a tissue procurement business that is not covered by HIPAA, and several abortion clinics that are. StemExpress paid fees to the abortion clinics for fetal tissue and maternal blood and then resold the fetal tissue and the blood to researchers.

Here is a quick HIPAA privacy tutorial:

The HIPAA privacy rule protects all individually identifiable health information, known as protected health information, or PHI, that is held or transmitted by a covered entity. This information identifies an individual or can reasonably be believed to be useful in identifying an individual, such as a name or an address, and includes demographic data related to her physical or mental health, condition, treatment, and payments.

The panel's investigation indicates that StemExpress and four abortion clinics, including three Planned Parenthood locations, committed systemic violations of a HIPAA privacy rule over a course of about 5 years.

The abortion clinics provided patients' private, protected health information to StemExpress to help them obtain human fetal tissue for resale.

How did they do this? Well, the abortion clinics permitted the employees of StemExpress to enter their clinics to obtain human fetal tissue from the aborted infants, obtain protected health information about their patients, interact with the patients, and, yes, even seek and obtain patient consent for the tissue donation.

StemExpress did not have a medically valid reason to see, and the abortion clinics did not have a reason to disclose, the patients' private information. Instead, the abortion clinics intentionally shared patients' most intimate private information with StemExpress to financially benefit StemExpress and the clinics.

The panel has made a referral of each of these entities to the Department of Health and Human Services and has requested a swift and full investigation by the HHS Office for Civil Rights. But more importantly, we have discovered a deeply concerning violation of a law that protects the most cherished privacy rights.

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