NH HHS subcommittee recommends against HB 621 after health officials warn of risks to newborn screening and federal funding

A subcommittee of the New Hampshire House Health, Human Services and Elderly Affairs Committee voted unanimously to recommend that HB 621 be reported Inexpedient to Legislate (ITL), after testimony that allowing mothers to opt out of providing personal identifiers on the live-birth worksheet would harm public-health programs and risk federal funding.

The issue, committee members were told, is not the collection of maternal and child-health statistics per se but the loss of personal identifiers — names, addresses, dates of birth and similar fields — that officials say are necessary to link records, run newborn screening and verify eligibility for programs such as Medicaid and child support.

"This was one of the few bills that we as a department actually took a position in opposing," John Williams, legislative director for the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), told the subcommittee. He said the department’s concerns were both fiscal and programmatic.

DHHS officials described several concrete harms they said could follow from the bill as written. A bureau chief in the division of public-health statistics said vital-record identifiers allow the department to link birth records to newborn-screening tests and other services, and to geocode addresses into small areas such as census tracts for rural-health work. "The personal identifiers are crucial for linking data across systems and ensuring that public-health efforts and social services can be effectively…