Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wasn’t kidding a few years ago when she said Congress had to pass Obamacare so the rest of the country could discover what was in it. Ever since then a steady stream of bad news has emerged as people pored over the 2,700 pages of Obamacare legalese. Just last week Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., found a new shocker that ought to be especially worrisome to anybody who cares about protecting the privacy of their medical records. As part of its implementation of Obamacare, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a new federal regulation to require private health insurance companies to give the government all of the health records of every person they insure. The rule is shrouded in the usual bureaucratese, but, as Huelskamp pointed out in a Washington Examiner op-ed, “abstract terms are used to distract from the real objectives of this idea: no matter which ‘option’ is chosen, government bureaucrats would have access to the health records of every American — including you.”

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius claims the government must have the records in order to evaluate the performance of health insurers. Aside from the absurdity of having federal health bureaucrats judge the job performance of anybody else, the proposal raises a gigantic red flag: Federal and state governments have proven repeatedly in recent years that they are all but incapable of fully protecting sensitive records of individuals.