Visualizing HR 3962: Affordable Health Care for America Act

Below is a visual of the top 500 words used in HR 3962: Affordable Health Care for America Act. Since most people (including many of our representatives in Washington) haven't read all 1,990 pages of the Health Care Reform Bill, I thought a visual aid might be helpful.

I had been thinking of creating the word cloud of the Bill since it was introduced on October 29, 2009, however, yesterday a couple of tweets by Vince Kuraitis caught my eye and I finally got around to creating the HR 3962 Wordle Cloud this morning. Vince's tweets looked into the word count of a couple of key words in the Bill. His tweets:

• @VinceKuraitis "medical home" referenced 67 times in latest House #healthreform leg
• @VinceKuraitis "pilot program" referenced 106 times in latest #healthreform leg -- lots of experimentation

In creating the cloud I was able to look at the use of some other words in the Bill. Here is what I found:

• Privacy referenced 28 times
• Insurance referenced 552 times
• Physician referenced 182 times
• Hospital referenced 330 times
• Consumer referenced 36 times
• Consumer-directed referenced 1 time
• Consumer-oriented referenced 1 time

Click graphic for larger/clearer version. Thanks to Wordle (www.wordle.net) for the cloud.

Congressional Members Concerned About HHS Inclusion of "Harm Standard" In Breach Notification Rule

Members of the U.S. House of Representative submitted an October 1, 2009 letter of concern to Secretary Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) concerning inclusion of a "harm standard" in the recently released(August 24, 2009) Interim Final Rule - Breach Notification for Unsecured Protected Health Information (45 CFR Part 160 and 164) 74 Fed. Reg. 42740.

HHS in developing the Interim Final Rule interpreted the term "compromises" as meaning that a threshold substantial harm standard should be included when determining whether a breach of data has occurred. However, the Members indicate in their letter that they considered whether a "harm standard" should be a part of the legislation and decided not to include such a standard. The letter urges HHS to revise and repeal the harm standard provisions included in the Interim Final Rule.

The letter was submitted by Rep. Henry Waxman, Rep. Charles Rangel, Rep. John Dingell, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., Rep. Pete Stark and Rep. Joe Barton.

Tip to Alan Goldberg, health care attorney and American Health Lawyer Association HIT Listserve Moderator, who posted a copy of the letter.