RFK Jr. Hands Millions of Patient Records to Big Pharma

The most valuable commodity in America today isn't oil or gold. It's your medical records.

Every prescription you fill, every diagnosis code attached to it, every date of service, every drug your doctor orders — that data is worth billions of dollars to companies building the AI systems that will shape medicine, pricing, and profit for the next generation. And right now, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s full knowledge and complete inaction, Big Pharma is taking your data — without your consent, without any patient privacy protections, and with zero mechanism to ever get it back.

On June 17, Boehringer Ingelheim sent a letter to every safety-net healthcare facility in America — more than 53,000 hospital, clinic, and community health center sites nationwide. The message: Hand over your patients' complete prescription claims data — every drug, every patient, every transaction — or lose access to BI products at 340B discounted prices. Deadline: July 6. No exceptions, unless you're in one of the 13 states that have passed laws to stop exactly this kind of extraction.

BI is the 12th drug company to do so. GSK, Eli Lilly, Amgen, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, and others have sent versions of the same letter. More than 40 manufacturers are now imposing some form of claims data requirement on the safety-net providers who serve America's most vulnerable patients. Soon, if you run a rural health clinic in Alabama or a federally qualified health center in Appalachia, you will pay for your drugs twice: once in dollars, and once in your patients' health records.

This is a profit-driven, ruthless shakedown.

The stated justification is "duplicate discount prevention." The argument goes like this: Drug companies need claims data to make sure they aren't being double billed between 340B and Medicaid. That argument has a fatal flaw. If duplicate discounts were the genuine concern, the data request would be focused on Medicaid claims only — because a duplicate discount can only occur when a Medicaid-covered prescription is also claimed under 340B.

Instead, these drug companies are demanding data on all prescriptions, from all patients, regardless of insurance status. Amgen has gone further still — demanding clinical service data that describes what care was actually delivered. That is a market research department's wish list. It is commercial intelligence disguised as compliance.

The data demanded by these companies flows into proprietary platforms — most prominently 340B ESP, operated by a company called Second Sight Solutions — and from there into pharmaceutical companies' commercial and analytics operations. Each of these companies has committed billions of dollars to AI systems for drug pricing, commercial strategy, prescribing-pattern analysis and market intelligence.

Every member of Congress must understand: When data is populated into an AI system, you cannot take it back. You can’t unlearn the data inside an AI model. Once your patient data enters Big Pharma's AI, it will never, ever come out.

Even worse, no one can guarantee that those records will be safeguarded from unauthorized access once Big Pharma has them. Recently, Axios reported that the electronic-records giant Epic is suing a data-sharing company for letting third parties posing as health providers siphon more than 300,000 patient medical files.

Is there anyone in Washington willing to hold Secretary Kennedy accountable for allowing your personal patient health information to be permanently fed into Big Pharma's AI maw?

Kennedy built his brand on one idea: the pharmaceutical industry had too much power over American health, and someone needed to have the courage to stand up to it. He wrote books. He gave speeches. He built a movement. And now he is Secretary of Health and Human Services — the official responsible for the Health Resources and Services Administration, which administers 340B — while 40 drug companies extract patient health data from the country's safety-net providers and route it into AI systems it will never leave.

The Department of Health and Human Services has filed legal briefs in federal court — on behalf of the drug companies — arguing that states don't have the right to stop this theft. The department has raised no HIPAA objections and sought no privacy protections.

We urge Congress to step in and stop this travesty.