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The US spent approximately 15% of its GDP on healthcare in 2003, and about 3% on military spending in 2003.

Healthcare:
http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/costgrowth/

Military:
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative- size.php

Hi,

My name is Fred Trotter I am the project manager for ClearHealth which is currently Office VistAs top competitor. I am also the project manager for the open source medical billing system FreeB. FreeB is the top contender to provide medical billing services to Office VistA. (which puts me in a position of coopertition with VistA) Because the VAs VistA operates with the federal government as a payer, there is no need for medical billing functionality in the core VistA. Interestingly this has directly impacted where VistA adoption has been able to occur; namely Federally funded clinics on Indian Reservations in the United States, and the entire country of Finland (from a very early fork). So generally VistA is a very powerful EHR for environments where you do not need to interact with more than one payer

I wanted to provide some insights regarding VistA gleaned from a newbies perspective. I have already attacked some of the myths on the LinuxMedNews discussion. Of those points mentioned in that discussion, I wanted to point out why so many differing opinions of VistA exist. This thread has already had the "VistA is great" and "Vista sucks" discussion which is largely invalid because it is almost impossible for these systems to be referring to the same thing. Because VistA is public domain under a FOIA request anyone can do anything they want with it.

More to the point they have done things with it. No two installations are alike. Even different VA hospitals have very different installations. I understand that there is even a Veterinary hospital that runs VistA. So it is really not possible to talk about whether VistA is "good" or "bad", rather it is only possible to describe its considerable community. Because the US govt releases the code under FOIA, there is no Linus to keep everyone on the same page.

There is an organization that attempts to make sense out of the chaos and that is WorldVista. WorldVistA tries to keep different versions of VistA compatible and to this end sponsors the OpenVistaA that often serves as the avatar, for better or worse of the VistA community.

There are also private companies that push VistA, most notably the well-fundedMedSphere. It is not clear whether this is a truely open source company, although they claim to be. Because VistA is FOIA there is no "keep-it-free" clause included. As a result MedSphere and anyone else is free to include proprietary code with VistA and then sell the result. MedSphere has made considerable improvements to their version of VistA and the VistA community is anxious to see those improvements, so it remains to be seen whether MedSphere is really an open source company or not. I think it will probably come out on the good side however, since its management includes Larry Augustin of VA Linux fame. My company http://uversainc.com/>Uversa considers MedSphere to be our only real competitor in the Open Source Medical Application market.

I try to post what Uversa is doing to slashdot on a regular basis. For the most part, what we have accomplished is ignored. Software to run doctors offices is pretty dry compared to robotics and video games, and my experience is that only geeks in the industry care to much. So I really cannot blame the editors. Still FreeB has been mentioned on slashdot before Other cool things that Uversa has done have largely been ignored. S

IMHO what's needed is legislation that will put the cost of privacy compromises on the entities that are best situated to prevent those compromises, namely businesses. The current sad state of affairs comes, of course, because businesses have no incentive to appoint a chief information security officer, absent a board-justifiable downside from the occasional loss of customers' information.

but no one will want to do it.

Apply the same privacy and security standards to financial institutions that HIPAA requires.

I went to work on a PC at a doctors office, it was the machine that contains patient records.
That machine was forbidden from being connected to the internet in ANY way what-so-ever and was forbidden from being connected to their inhouse LAN.

The STAND ALONE machine had a modem in it but it was only allowed to connect to a certain system through a single dial-up line.
No other use of the machine was permitted. It had no disc drives so it was not possible for employees to install stuff from home or to copy things from it.
The machine was pretty damn isolated from the outside world.

Of course that will never happen with financial institutes because they WANT these things to happen, that way the people will cry for more security. And they will get it, with Orwellian security like retina scans and sooner or later, DNA scans, like in the movie GATTACA

Personally, I have no financial anything. I don't use banks at all in any form. I have no credit, I have no savings or checking accounts, I have no credit cards.
I live strictly by cash alone. Everything I own is paid for. I pay utility bills with green cash, in person at the local grocery store. I owe no one for anything.
You want to steal my identity? I don't give a shit, go ahead, I don't use it anyway..

"It is perfectly legal for third party companies to combine this information and it is being done today. Why do you think it is illegal? Do you understand what the credit reporting agencies are doing?"

Perhaps in another country, but not in the United States of America, it is not legal. Not without violating about 10 different laws, the HIPAA and dozens of various privacy policies guaranteeing that the information is NOT shared with third parties.

If you have direct evidence of companies doing it, please speak up... because they're breaking the law. Please provide some actual evidence.

...unfortunately, the US fed gov't often uses .doc and .xls on its documents by default. Want examples? Look inside the .zip files...what could just as easily be small delimited files are wrapped up in a lovely .xls protective shell.

HIPPA or HIPAA (which ever one it was!)

I don't know if the US government has any specific policies reguarding PPI and financial data, but the HHS has HIPAA http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/ for personal medical data. The state of California has SB1386 to protect Californians personal financial data. However, neither go far enough and I am supprised more incidents are not made public. I suspect there are many more security breaches that companies are quiet.

There's no way that will fly in the courts, unless they start issuing passports to all US citizens who want them, and are unable to revoke them.

There are some interesting court cases deciding if the executive branch can revoke passports at will, like it says it can, but those hinge on the fact it doesn't actually have congressional authority to do so, not that it might be unconstitutional, because it's not currently so...the US government has the right to say 'We do not authorize this person to travel in our name'.

What they do not have, however, and should be a fun court case, is the ability to revoke a citizen's permission to enter the country and still leave him a citizen. By saying 'We only accept a passport' and 'we can revoke passports at will', they are essentially claiming such.

Another interesting point is...can they require specific documentation at all? Even non-revokable documentation, like birth certificates. US citizens don't have the right to enter the US 'if they prove they're citizens how the government wishes them to', they just have the ability to enter, period.

And the government has the right to challenge that claim, of course, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what gives the government specific authority to set documentation standards instead of how the government is supposed to decide things...in court. (I can see in addition to court, but not instead of.)

Nobody should have to live in mortal fear of losing their job

Anyhow, if you think that ANYBODY lives in poverty in the US, then you need to visit a third world country. Not being able to afford satellite TV on the latest flat-screen HDTV is not poverty.

People living in "poverty" in the US have clean drinking water, access to at least some health care, a roof over their heads, some food to put in their bellies, etc. Their most basic of human needs are met.

I don't think anyone should be allowed to bitch about poverty in the US who hasn't visited a third world country. That is poverty.

According to TFA, the researchers got approval from their IRB. Seems to me there's a potential benefit not just to society at large (better understanding of how phishing schemes work), but also to the actual students involved in the study (learning how to protect themselves better). Indiana University better have the researchers' backs on this one.

According to TFA, the researchers got approval from their IRB. Seems to me there's a potential benefit not just to society at large (better understanding of how phishing schemes work), but also to the actual students involved in the study (learning how to protect themselves better). Indiana University better have the researchers' backs on this one.

At first I thought it was an April fool's joke when I saw "National Microbial Laboratory Canada" which does not exist - "Health Canada National Microbiology Laboratory" does exist though. But, unfortunately, it's just another example of poor reporting and maybe some CYA politics.

The article implies that because this is an old virus, people born after 1968, the last time it was in a vaccine, have no immunity to it. What she was probably told was that it was unlikely that anyone born after 1968 would be immune to it which is quite different. Influenza vaccines are (somewhat) effective because although the viruses mutate rapidly, they are related and exposure to a related virus can confer resistance. If the reporter had done a Google like I did http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/pandemics/flu3.htm, she would have found that the same family of flu resurfaced in 1978 and a member of this family was included in vaccines after that.

Finally, according to the article, this kit has been floating around for a year with that sample and most countries only require level 2 facilities to handle it. Scientists value their lives as much as the next guy - so it's apparent that noone thought much of the risk. Makes me wonder whether the viruses were even infective. The recommendation for the virus in the kit to be destroyed only came about when the Canadian lab found it in another sample - meaning someone got sloppy and everyone went into CYA mode. Anyway, it probably is a good idea not to have that virus in the kit, if only to avoid articles like this - which was probably the thinking at WHO, rather than this being a real risk.

what the heck is HIPAA?

Try the Health & Human Services - Office for Civil Right - HIPAA for some information. HIPAA is relevant to the article because it strengthened medical privacy laws.

Let's see if I can reconstruct my sources. BTW, my post wasn't intended to be a paper or taken as fact. It's a post on Slashdot. Let me repeat that: it's a post on Slashdot. I would hope interested readers would look it up for themselves.

"Hopefully, politics be damned, he will show that schools which teach abstinence-only sexual education have significantly higher rates of teenage pregnancy than districts with real sexual education courses"
What source did you get this information from?
What is defined as 'real sexual education courses'?

The latest example I've heard of came out of england a few months ago. NPR did a pretty substantial segment on it. But I've read it many places and many sources throughout the years. The American Medical Association and Planned Parenthood both have official negative stances on Abstinence-only education for this very reason.

I'm defining "real sex education courses," as one whose primary goal is to educate about sex. Education in this context is to provide a broad spectrum of information that a person will need to make informed choices. Abstinence-only isn't an education because it isn't providing information about the activity, it's just a policy to try to swear people off of it. Like how "Rock the vote" isn't really voter education, it's a get-out-the-vote drive.

"Or even that 50% of high school students are already sexually active"
What source did you get this information from?

That's a pretty widely known statistic, man: sources abound. Here's one, from the department of Health and Human Services.

"Of course, it might be stepping over the line to point out that the bible belt has the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, higher than the hedonistic blue states"
What source did you get this information from?

That would be the CDC.

While I respect almost anyone's comments don't be so hasty to bash the religious yet neglect the "scientific superiority" of cited sources. The well known and well-cited 'they' always come back to haunt you.

Whenever someone doesn't cite their sources, google it. There is a wealth of information out there at your fingertips.

They are in fact already doing this with another subset of our personal information: our medical history. HIPAA prevents anyone from accessing your medical data that you haven't authorized. I'm starting a new job tomorrow and had a pre-employment drug screening today. I asked the nurse if she needed to note any prescriptions I've had recently. The nurse said they couldn't even ask that; that only the lab people could ask that if something came up. If Congress can get a law passed that protects our medical history, why can't they pass one that protects our financial history?

Most forms of government have little reason to make things more efficient and much incentive to maintain the status quo.

Insurance companies get their pound of flesh. They have no reason to change the status quo, either.

Take a look at all the problems with the wellfare department (now Health and Human Services) and you will see why. H&HS now takes up about %25 of the US annual budget and recieves more in funding than the DoD.

Uhm... what problems with the welfare department? Please don't recite rhetoric, provide examples.

I'm not sure if you realize this, but H&HS is much more than welfare. In fact, welfare accounts for only $49B of the H&HS budget. (Source.) That is significantly less than the $390B that is going to the military.

H&HS covers NIH, the CDC, IHS, Medicare and Medicaid (which account for $453B of the H&HS budget), etc.

Here is the CMS homepage for the project.

So how will the work of this consortium integrate with that being done by the HL7 organization? And if there's a disagreement between standards bodies about how best to comply with HIPAA regulations, how does it get worked out?

Your best bet there would be the draconian (and appropriate) penalties associated with violating the HIPAA rules, with which medical, IT, and insurance people trifle at their peril.

Believe me, you screw up on that end, and it's huge fines and/or jail. Federal time.

Other crusades have been

The prohibition of Alchohol during 20's. Alcohol was the the leading factor in bad health, missed work, crime, violence, etc. ie, it was the root of all evil, so banning it ofcourse would fix all these social ills.

Communism during early fifties. For its strange ability to make people homosexual. Which of course makes it the root of all evil.

The evil "switch blade" which suddenly in the late 50's became the root of all evil and in the midst of much hysteria in congress, had to be banned for our own good.

Child Porn during the late 70's. mentioned above.

Public key encryption during the early 90's, Logic dictates that Citizens with unbreakable encyption are probably criminals.

Mean looking guns, which have supplanted switch blades as the source of all crime during the 90's.

copywrite infringers in the late 90's.

Terrorists which somehow only live in oil rich nations for the 2000's.

and now video copywrite infingers.

I think his point is that its just another crusade. Something blown out of proportion to what it really should be. Check the stats:

In 2002, there was an estimated 896,000 cases of abused children. More than 60 percent of child victims experienced neglect. Almost 20 percent were physically abused; 10 percent were sexually abused; and 7 percent were emotionally maltreated. In addition, almost 20 percent were associated with "other" types of maltreatment based on specific State laws and policies.

Of those 10% that were sexually abused, how many were abused just so that they could be photographed? Does Child Porn really get the attention it deserves or is it getting a lion share because it is somehow more dirty and news worthy than a kid getting beaten to death by his drunk step dad.

According to the United Nations report on child welfare, the USA and most other Western nations received a passing grade.

Why are you singling out China above the Western nations that don't receive a passing grade? According to UNICEF, the situation in China is improving. For that matter, ~1,400 children die of abuse and neglect in the USA every year, and it may be getting worse. I don't care if the UN considers that a "pass", I certainly don't, and my original claim stands: abuse is rampant in the USA too. You'll note that I'm backing up what I say with links to statistics... are you going to do likewise, or just make vague references?

Are you Chinese? Now, I get it.

I'm British actually. Are you a xenophobe? Now I get it.

But I think you'll find that in terms of percentage by class that are infected with HIV, the rich and poor share a similar proportion.

Whooooooooa, where, exactly, are you getting this total bullshit. I mean, it stinks just like your ass where you pulled it from. The largest majority of people with HIV is most certainly people below what the US determines as the Federal Poverty Level.

"If you can afford it" is not tacked onto "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

There's already a National Directory of New Hires. This is supposedly to locate "deadbeat dads". Enforcement against employers is weak. But it's there.

On behalf of the United States, HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson signed the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) on Monday at the United Nations ... The next step for the treaty in the United States is submission to the Senate, following completion of further interagency review of the treaty.

Have a look at this list of treaties submitted to the Senate - I can't see many that Bush would bother turning up to to sign, do you?

What are the chances of 2 Texas oilmen (financially supported by many more oilmen) giving us a coherent national energy policy which frees us from dependency on oil and the Middle East?

Slim. And it's important.

What are the chances that 2 trial lawyers (who's biggest contributors are the trial lawyers associations) giving us the litigation reforms so crucial to getting escalating health care and pharm costs under control for the long term viability of our economy?

Slim. And it's not important. Litigation is not the cause of escalating health care costs. Period. No debate. stupid politically-motivated studies aside, the actual cost of litigation hovers around 1-5% of current health care costs. Oh, it's a burden. It's just not what's causing a 50% increase.

The cause of escalating health care costs is the fact that health care is a classic example of non-Adam-Smith economics. Traditional economic theories assume that there's a free market which has few network effects, external pressures, or entry costs. Health care has these in spades.

"Huh," you say? Network effects: not everyone can play. The network effects in healthcare are largely regional. If you have broken your back in Texas, you're going to go to a clinic near your home in Texas even if New York has better deals on broken back doctors. Hospitals tend to compete and form networks in a regional basis, as do HMOs and POS systems.

Entry costs: it costs a ton to make a hospital (for example), largely in initial costs you have to have in order to run the hospital at all, even if you don't see a dime in profits from them. Case in point: MRIs. MRIs are really expensive. The US has over fifty times as many MRIs as Canada does. But it has less than ten times the population. Why? Because every hospital in the US has to have an MRI to be competitive ("come to St. John's, we have an MRI!"), so we buy these mega-expensive things which then are terribly underutilized, hence the rise in things like full-body scans. Canada basically says that for something as rare as an MRI, you have to travel to the nearest medium-sized city to use one.

Another example. In a 200,000-person city in my state (Virginia) there's two hospitals. In another 200,000-person city there's a single hospital (a monopoly). Which is cheaper? The single hospital by far. Because with the two competing hospitals, they BOTH have to get emergency rooms, MRIs, cancer wards, cardiac centers, obstetrics wards, all the expensive stuff to compete with one another. So they've got twice as much entry cost stuff which is only used half as much. The savings, er, costs, get passed onto you. This is a counterintuitive result: people normally think competition is good. But when initial costs are astronomical, competition is bad. It's why government-run utilities have done so much better than the free-market utility debacles we're seeing in California etc.

External pressures. People don't buy health care rationally. We are exceptionally irrational about how we buy health care. Especially as our condition becomes more critical: "I'll pay anything for a few more mediocre months of life!" So a huge amount of money in our health care system goes into just the last few months of life: perhaps as much as 15%. It's nothing short of astounding. And we don't improve things much. It is this effect, combined with our inability to collectively bargain, that make us dead meat when it comes to dealing with the drug companies. These companies have massive, frankly criminal, profit margins because they know that there's no big organization that will step in and simply say to them, no, I will not buy your stupid $10,000-a-month drug. Similarly, malpractice insurance companies can basically charge anything they want because they know that the docs just pass the savings onto you -- the doc

I have not jumped through the registration hoops to RTFA, but are you sure it said "Free access to research data" in it? There is a very large difference between free articles and free data. You are also ignoring the various privacy rules that accompany such data (e.g., HIPAA, IRB, etc).

Worth noting is that NIH has serious clout wrt gov policy. There is an almost viral quality present. When they shifted their IRB rules, every other agency pretty much followed suit due to the Common Rule.

In fact it does. In health care circles there is much hoopla over privacy, especially with Hipaa regulations and the like. For this kind of data, at least, the metric is that it's permissible to release such data (for research studies, perhaps) without authorization if the personally identifiable information has been removed. Since the technology mentioned in the CNN article does not track individuals -- indeed it doesn't seem to be much more than a motion sensor and voice prompts that respond to movement -- it thus falls in a completely different category from one that does, a la "Minority Report."

the OP said as much

For privacy reasons, we are required to sample brief snippets of ambient sounds instead of recording an entire day continuously ('Big Brother is listening to you...').

compare, for example, to the latest (federal) medical privacy rules, www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/

I doubt YOU have any customers to deal with, especially with your "my way or the highway" attitude. Get back to being laid off [...]

I work for a GPO. It's my job to write contracts for health care companies. It's a staggeringly boring occupation, but I do get to spend a lot of time thinking about what would happen if someone died because of a failure in a piece of equipment bought through one of my contracts.*

I see a lot of EULA-style documents. You might be surprised how many software companies have simply taken the EULA from Windows98 and adopted it as their own license agreement. You might also be surprised how many suppliers are willing to offer code escrow or source code access to customers. I've certainly seen some things I never would have expected.

But you know what surprises me the most? That some vendors don't seem to care that their slipshod implementation could result in harm to a patient. For example, I recently spoke with a sales rep from a large point-of-care software vendor. He was very very excited to tell me all about the features his web-enabled software offered, like giving me REALTIME! ACCESS! TO! PATIENT! DIAGNOSTICS! but when I asked him about security, his answer was "well, that's the customer's responsibility." The base functionality required for this app is to take a bunch of data from a handheld device over serial port, dump it into a networked database, and then provide reports from that database into a web frontend for multiple users, with a user administration tool tacked on as an afterthought. What did his application run on? IIS, and it requires IE on the client desktop. Do they SSL-encrypt traffic on the network? Of course not. Do they send patient name and ID number in cleartext along with their REALTIME!!! test results? Well, the data wouldn't be much good if you don't know who it belongs to, now would it?

tinfoil-hat concerns aside, healthcare organizations are now required to comply with HIPAA, and if they fail to do so, people can go to jail. If the blood lab at one of my customers' hospitals buys this software, and someone is able to plug a laptop into their network and intercept data sent by their crappy IIS application, that's a clear HIPAA breach - but who is responsible for it? It's my job to make sure my customers aren't going to federal prison as a result of a poorly informed software purchase... you can bet that they're not buying the software.

see, you assume that the customer is always right. In fact, the customer is often wrong, either because they are ignorant, or because they are receiving some kind of incentive (read: bribe) from at least one vendor in order to influence their decisions. When you use Windows in healthcare, the "customer is always right" attitude could land your customer in federal prison.

*(what happens? Somebody gets sued. Usually, the dead patient's family sues the doctor and/or the hospital, and potentially the vendor, and also potentially my company. If the contract is written well, the vendor is obligated to step in and indemnify the doctor, our customer, and us against any claims. The funny thing is that vendors running on windows are NEVER NEVER NEVER willing to volunteer this indemnification- I always have to fight for it, and sometimes we just can't get it. If there's an alternative vendor who will indemnify, they usually end up winning the business, because this is such an important concern for the health care providers...)

Why are they even accessible on the internet?

Electronic Billing Systems.

Simply put, the hospital would like to get paid, preferably in a timely fashion. Hospitals are large enough to insource billing, as opposed to hiring an outside service. However, the data still has to be electronically submitted either to a clearinghouse or directly to insurance companies. Medicare requires electronic submission of claims from most "providers". Yes, sure, things could have been set up for a secure modem number, but they weren't.

... to be HIPAA compliant, your health-care organization must "reasonably safeguard protected health information from any intentional or unintentional use or disclosure." However, if SP3 is installed, Microsoft can now access your machines containing safeguarded information, such as confidential medical records. Ironically, however, you must install SP3 to be secure. Thus, every organization that needs to meet HIPAA's regulations must choose the lesser of two evils.

In short, this is one of the worst blurbs on Slashdot so far, seemingly intended to be yet another shot at the Patriot Act, a law which is misunderstood by many and not read at all by most. Yet, this shot includes no real information at all. Is someone afraid that this Slashdot discussion will be subpoenaed?

Why is authentication needed?

Apparently preventing people dying from terrorism is more important than preventing them from dying for good old fashioned disease!

Galileo International and Sabre, also gave sensitive passenger information, including home phone numbers, credit card numbers and health data, without disclosing the transfers to travelers or asking their permission.

According to HIPAA, this is a big, costly, no-no.

IANAL. Yeah yeah.

You could hack the source to not upload, but then your download rate would suck. BitTorrent downloaders engage in tit-for-tat with their peers, so leeches have very little success downloading.

Ours might not be the most common circumstance, since most internet users aren't bound by HIPAA and other regulations to tightly control what leaves their networks. How many web programmers do you know that have (or should have) the official government Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act home page bookmarked, for assistance in deciding what can and can not be displayed under what security circumstances? Probably not that many, but, for those of us who do, it means that certain popular distribution methods are not kosher at this point in time.

Jigdo is compliant, since it uses established protocols, and is inbound-only. Bittorrent may or may not be compliant, and I'm not in the mood to be the one who tries to get it approved.

If someone HAS the ISOs, they can make and post the .jigdo and .template files required. And the load on the servers now hosting the ISOs would be lowered significantly, since any mirror that has the basic files for the distribution can be a "jigdo ISO mirror", using either FTP or HTTP.

Good luck getting those records from HIPAA. Take off the tinfoil hat.

From the article:

When the tissue was broken up, filtered to remove anything more than 200nm and the filtrate added to a sterile medium, the optical density - or cloudiness - of the medium increased.

This, the researchers argue, means the nanoparticles were multiplying of their own accord.

Doesn't sound exactly convincing. A lot of protein-like structures reproduce, but aren't considered to be alive. A good example is the prion that causes mad cow disease.

Weaselmancer

$13 an hour is WELL above poverty here in the US.

2003 Federal Poverty Guidelines

Please get some facts before you post. If I'm doing my math correctly, $13 an hour is enough for at least a family of 4 people to be above the poverty level.

How are you defining poverty line?

The US Gov't defines the poverty line for a single person as $9k a year. A family of 5 can be above poverty at $23k a year.

It might be better to talk about "HIPAA Capable" or "HIPAA Ready". As another poster said, HIPAA compliance is a much more complicated matter than just software. It is no more correct to say that a piece of software is "HIPAA compliant" than it is to say it is "ISO-9000 compliant". Both are broad standards that cover a range of practices well beyond the scope of any possible software.

HIPAA has three sections: Transactions, Privacy, and Security. I'm more familiar with the Privacy and Security regs than Transaction standards... but I think it might be possible for y'all to claim that the software "fully supports HIPAA compliant transactions".

You'll have to do some research on the final rules.

I think it's even worse than being expected, as an able-bodied sane adult, to pay your own rent and buy your own food.

And what about all the folks who don't fall into that category? Not able-bodied, not sane, not adult? A really huge proportion of the homeless population falls into these categories.

So what about "the rest"? You know Wal-Mart, the country's largest employer, pays an average wage of $7.50. Most of their employees are part-time, and can't afford to buy into the company health insurance plan. The kind human resources folks at Wal-Mart actually hand out instructions on applying for food stamps, because so many of their employees are eligible. They should starve, I suppose, because they should have been able to get a better job?

The Federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. That's $10,712 a year, for someone with 100% full-time employment. There are a few places you can live on that, but not many. Reflecting this, the 2003 Department of Health and Human Services Poverty Guidelines set the poverty line at $12,120 for a family of two. So if you're a single parent working full-time at minimum wage, you're below the poverty line, which is based on the cost of the "emergency temporary diet" -- a construction that has nothing to do with three squares a day or the USRDA of any nutrient -- multiplied by three, since the average family spends a third of their budget on food.

So, no, I don't generally think that in the American labor market we can expect everyone to pay their own rent and buy their own food, given that you can be employed full-time and not be able to do these things.

The actual press release about homelessness (released today) has nothing to do with RFID tech.

"To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to improve portability and continuity of health insurance coverage in the group and individual markets, to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery, to promote the use of medical savings accounts, to improve access to long-term care services and coverage, to simplify the administration of health insurance, and for other purposes."

Yes, simply make the US companies (and government departments) truely responsible (ie their ass is on the line) for protecting this information. If the cost of failure is higher than other savings, then they themselves will implement strict requirements, and will only want to contract out to groups who have proven themselves to be trustworthy.

HIPPA = Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act, is a VERY big deal for pateint privacy. I wonder if this was a violation ?
HIPPA carries some hefty fines is this was in fact a violation.

And they say that they're not a blacklist... just an informational database targeting a group of people a specific profession may not want to do business with... rrrrright... and I'm not computer geek... I'm just a very intelligent person who would rather spend time coding or doning computer related stuff instead of socializing...

The CDC has a couple good pages on pandemics, of which the spanish flu was the worst in the 20th century.

90% of HIPAA has nothing to do with computers. All the heavy lifting is facility security of patient records and workflow around privacy.

90% of the 10% left is handled by vendors that sell enterprise apps to payers and providers. This industry doesn't write their own apps -- most of the jobs are baby-sitting vendor systems. It doesn't take too much walking around most hospitals to figure out that this industry spends as little as possible on systems.

And, by law, everyone is supposed to be HIPAA compliant this year. So, too late.