Now, that's a wonderful thing. That's one manifestation of freedom. Then, there's free speech, the freedom of the press, the right to travel. And also, I might add, minority rights of all kinds, restrictions on the ability of government to compromise the fundamental interests and rights of those who may not agree with the majority. Because there are new and different ways for that privacy to be restricted.
Nothing is more private than someone's medical or psychiatric records.
And, therefore, if we are to make freedom fully meaningful in the Information Age, when most of our stuff is on some computer somewhere, we have to protect the privacy of individual health records. The new rules we release today protect the medical records of virtually every American, they represent the most sweeping privacy protections ever written, and they are built on the foundation of the bipartisan Kennedy-Kassebaum legislation I signed four years ago. This action is required by the great tides of technological and economic change that have swept through the medical profession over the last few years. Seldom were those records shared with anyone outside the doctor's office. Today, physicians increasingly store them electronically, and they are now obliged to share those records in paper or electronic form with insurance companies and other reviewers.