Your Medical Treatment History Is For Sale 607
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."
HIPPA (Score:5, Informative)
Sell my medical records and my lawyer will be in touch with your lawyer. See Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [wikipedia.org]
Re:HIPPA (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Vigilantism is s (Score:3, Informative)
It's been done [imdb.com].
Re:Health care, what health care? (Score:4, Informative)
And to play devil's advocate to your devil's advocate what happens to you if your good health turns out not to be as good as you think it is?
I don't think someone should be made to pay higher healthcare costs for stuff that isn't his fault. But I think it should be fair game on lifestyle choices. If you smoke or drink then I think you should pay more in to the "system."
The really sad part I see is people seem to think the healthcare in general sucks. Which I don't see as true. Medicine in general is the best it has ever been. What sucks is the bureaucracy and the bullshit that as built up around it.
Re:A Non-Issue. (Score:3, Informative)
You can walk to the store and work. You can't perform an appendectomy on yourself.
Interestingly, a little searching found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-surgery [wikipedia.org]
Take a look at the first bullet under the heading "Abdominal."
So there you have it...*shudders*
-G
Re:mod parent up (Score:4, Informative)
wrong.
wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
repeat after me; wrong.
why, you wonder, are you wrong? in a system where market participants place performance, or more properly, are bound by law to place performance, above all other measures of success it is plain that the welfare of the consumer is not considered unless also mandated by law, and even then will be considered less important than the business's performance if there are not sufficiently dissuasive penalties.
for further reference see RailTrack [wikipedia.org].
Re:Health care, what health care? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Health care, what health care? (Score:3, Informative)
AFAIK In Canada selling this information is illegal
That it is... well, unless you sign a disclosure, which the article claims is required if you want to get insurance in the first place. So you're basically boned in the US if you want health care coverage *and* your personal privacy.
Re:HIPPA (Score:5, Informative)
"thus the only way to increase their income [...]" (Score:5, Informative)
"thus the only way to increase their income is to get more and more patients"
Not really.. they can go work in a private clinic, or they can work in another country (as you already pointed out). Thank goodness there's many doctors who don't particularly care about increasing their income - who got into the job because they can genuinely help fellow man and all that sort of altruistic stuff that we, as a society, are far too eager to write off and laugh at. These are doctors who will give treatment for free if needed (and sometimes if not*), instead of some doctors only giving free treatment while on a P.R. trip to a poor country (not dissing the gesture, just dissing the motives).
And, let's be honest, they don't really -need- the higher income because they don't have to worry about multi-million dollar malpractice suits looming around every single corner and the insurance that goes with it.
I'm not saying that 'socialized' healthcare is panacea.. far from it.. but that "happy medium where everyone wins" should not be led by the desire to make more money - focus instead on reducing or eliminating the negatives you mentioned.
* I had a nasty bruised-looking toe - walked (well, semi-hopped) straight into the hospital (hadn't registered for a GP yet after moving), got to see a doc in 10 minutes who had an x-ray made 5 minutes later 'just to be safe', determined that it was indeed broken as he suspected, got me a splint, had a nurse put it on while he moved on to another patient, came back to do a quick check to make sure it was on right, and sent me on my way. That's it. Didn't send me past administration for my insurance info on my way out, and certainly not on my way in.. I was a guy with a nasty bruised-looking toe who needed to have a look at it done by a doc and that's all they cared about. Thanks, MCH. I know this is anecdotal, and I'm all too familiar with waiting lists as well, but it's not nearly as bad as some make it out to be. Being on a waiting list for an organ, however, does suck - but that seems to be the case regardless of medical system; short of countries where there's a lively 'grey'/black market in organs. Yikes.
Re:Health care, what health care? (Score:3, Informative)
The US healthcare system, while not perfect, isn't the real problem. The real problem is the US health insurance system.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Health care, what health care? (Score:3, Informative)
No, in theory, you can choose to not sign it, and go somewhere else. (however, pretty much everywere requires it).
Re:Health care, what health care? (Score:4, Informative)
I developed debilitating (and somewhat unusual) asthma that went undiagnosed for too many years. I wound up taking drugs (two corticosteroids and a beta agonist) prescribed by a good pulmonologist. The drugs reduced my asthma to a mere annoyance. Believe me when I tell you that I don't miss the smell of blood when I cough. You might be tempted to call that treatment a success of modern medicine.
Unfortunately, from my perspective it was a failure. The side effects I experienced included insomnia and anxiety severe enough to affect my life nearly as much as the asthma did. Think the afternoon after flunking a test you stayed up all night studying for. Well, not quite that bad, but you get the idea. Drugs to treat those conditions were either highly addictive and sedating or made matters worse (e.g. ambien resulted in nightmarish daytime anxiety).
Eventually, I took the advice of a friend and saw a practitioner of traditional chinese medicine. Though skeptical, I figured I had nothing to lose and went in for treatment with an open mind. The guy prescribed medicinal tea (roots, bark, fruit, dried worms, insect shells, etc.) and performed acupuncture weekly. Three months later, I feel much, much better, having eliminated two of the drugs and greatly lowered the dose of the third. I sleep at night. I can breath. Life is good. This after years of trying to cope.
Now I'll be the first in line to agree with you that personal testimonials are notoriously unreliable. And I don't recommend that anyone cite my story as proof positive of anything. But I'll tell you that I am personally convinced of two things: First, that the drug companies effectively mislead doctors and patients to underestimate side effects of their wares; and second, that something in this alternative therapy is working, and working dramatically well.
If indeed my recovery is due to the placebo effect - which I strongly doubt because I have a far stronger belief in conventional medicine - it has been worth every penny.
P.S. I still don't believe that sticking needles into my skin has anything to do with curing my asthma, but I put up with it rather than challenging either my beliefs or the chinese medical approach that seems to be working. For what its worth, my primary care physician (medical doctor) seems to beileve somewhat strongly in the effectiveness of acupuncture for some things.
HIPAA Violation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Alarmism (Score:2, Informative)
Anyway, my point was that as a worker in the financial industry, my credit score is relevant. Not the be all and end all, but relevant. Oh, and you don't necessarily have a bad credit score if you don't use credit. You just won't have a good one.
Re:Health care, what health care? (Score:5, Informative)
"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."
I see you bought into the propaganda. The governments allocate a certain portion of the budget to GP expenses (ie: Doctors office visits). Which means, Doctors can only see so many patients before the budget is blown. Waiting room times have severely diminished thanks to Alberta led procedures. And because of caps, they can't hire more Doctors.
The Provincial Governments don't increase this funding when population grows - hence they kept saying it was 'unsustainable' (and run Provincial surpluses cause they can't count!). And people bought the BS. Too bad Slashdot doesn't allow attachments, because the Conference Board of Canada has some eye opening reports that contradict your memes. And links are useless, as the CBoC is a for-pay site.
Not exactly "medical records" (Score:3, Informative)
The information does not come from doctors. From TFA:
Ingenix and Milliman create the profiles by plumbing rich databases of prescription drug histories kept by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which help insurers process drug claims.
Wikipedia has more on PBMs [wikipedia.org]