B331 Locking up medical data 331. There are no federal laws that protect medical privacy in the private sector. Medical records are traded over the Internet. Employers use them to refuse to hire or promote those considered a poor risk.
Banks call in loans of people who have had heart attacks.
And pharmaceutical companies use information corralled from drug stores to urge patients to ask their doctors for the pills they're pushing. All this is now supposed to end. The Clinton administration has posted some 600 pages of regulations concerning medical privacy for public comment. Later in the year, these are to become the law of the land. These new regulations also amount to the first large- scale introduction of government controls into cyberspace.