The last thing patients need is to see more doctors fleeing solo practice rather than continuing to wrestle with thousands of pages of baffling billing rules in which a simple mistake can mean a fraud charge. Yet the privacy proposal would bar insurance companies from referring to medical records in underwriting new patients. The effect is to favor opening records for pursuit of fraud after the fact, but restrict access to information that could prevent fraud in the first place. Insurance buyers who are in good health are doomed to pay higher premiums to cover those who are not entirely frank about their medical history. Another force behind companies' hunger for more information comes from the business side of medicine.
Emotion again drives the debate.
The answer is startling. Stopping the information flow between drug companies and patients using their products means less competition between pharmaceutical products. The patient is left with only his or her doctor as an information source. The administration's proposed privacy policy would allow patient information to be used for marketing purposes only if the consumer allows it. Many patients have a vague fear that a drug company's using patient information to develop a product or reach a market poses some danger to them.