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Your Medical Treatment History Is For Sale
PizzaFace writes "The Washington Post reports on the booming business of selling your medical treatment records. Today these are mainly records of your prescriptions, but the data warehouses will soon have records of your lab tests, too. The companies selling these records make it easy for insurance companies to avoid risk by assigning each person a health score, similar to a credit score, or by flagging items in each person's history that suggest chronic or potentially expensive health problems. It's not just for insurers, either; employers who check applicants' credit scores will surely be interested in their health scores as well."
Maybe I'm missing something and there's a loop-hole, but AFAIK In Canada selling this information is illegal, and I thought that medical records were confidential in the US as well (apparently not). In Canada patients and health care professionals have client/doctor confidentiality similar to client / lawyer confidentiality. A doctor's office would lose it's practice if it handed over information to anyone without the patient's consent.
Of course there's downsides to our system too. Since health care is public doctor's can only charge so much and thus the only way to increase their income is to get more and more patients so doctors are over-worked and the waiting rooms are always packed with huge waits. Plus more and more of our top doctors move to the US where they can earn more. There's gotta be some kind of happy medium where everyone wins.
Healthcare rationing! Long waiting lists! Socialism!
Of course, healthcare in the US is already rationed (just according to your ability to pay for it) and you already have to wait for procedures and tests (like the week and a half it took my wife to get the insurance company and various doctors involved to schedule an MRI that everyone agreed she needed).
Insurance companies are probably the worst type of organization to have making healthcare decisions.
It's immediately possible to equate your devil's advocacy to the inability to have empathy for others.
Your good health is nice, and it is also likely to be transient for reasons other than good actions you have taken yourself. Even if you've been a bit of a slut and got HIV (or an other STD), or let yourself become obese (with incumbent diabetes and arteriosclerosis), or have smoked like a fiend, you're still a human, and we still want you to live. Really. Those that don't, having no empathy, are in fact sociopathic and by a component of its definition.
So, Satan, fsck off.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Generally, if something claims to cure EVERYTHING, it really can't. And quite often cures nothing.
My problem with "colloidal silver" is that the proponents of it claim it cures everything... prostate enlargement... cystic fibrosis.... lukemia, depression, skin rash.... cataracts, uhm.. what else have I heard....
Oh and it will bring your grandma back to life, right, I forgot that one.
The problem with claims like that is that they're completely and utterly absurd.
What, exactly does it do?
Has there ever been a double-blind study done by an unbiased research organization (such as a publicly funded university laboratory) that you can cite?
I'm curious...