Medical Privacy: Big Brother vs. Big Bucks

[Andrew Seth Becker <nili@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>]

Excerpted from _The Limits of Privacy_ (Basic Books, 1999) by Amitai
Etzioni

"(Medical) Privacy is unnecessarily compromised without serving any
important common good.
	"The violations of privacy we have seen are not those that have
attracted much attention- unauthorized uses of medical information by some
rogue individual- but highly systematic and authorized abuses of personal
information.
	"The violators are not the individualists' usual culprit, the
government, but are mainly privacy merchants, profit-making companies that
grow rich by selling information about people's medical conditions to all
comers.
	"The most effective treatments to shore up medical privacy cannot
rely on the legal fiction of informed consents by millions of patients for
every use of every piece of information about them, but on new
privacy-enhancing technologies (e.g., audit trails) and institutional
arrangements (e.g., changing reimbursement systems).
	"Above all, we need to rethink the public policy, normative, and
constitutional assumptions that underlie our conception of privacy."

_The Limits of Privacy_ is available at your local bookseller, at
Amazon.com, an by calling 1-800-245-7460