We are entering a new era in the potential for government to control you via your physician. The HIPPA Act is ostensibly about Privacy and Portability. The problem is that those are mutually exclusive. Either you have privacy, OR your medical information is portable. Perhaps you are one of those unlucky few whose test results have gone to the wrong physician or whose bill has arrived at the wrong address due to mix-ups in computer-managed records. Perhaps your physician's records have been hacked, and your medical record leaked into the wrong hands. This is but the tip of the iceberg. You might also be someone who has been refused health or life insurance because long years ago you visited a doctor for some symptom. The symptom turned out to be benign and is long gone, but the permanent record that followed you around is not.
These days, a new threat to life, liberty, and medical care has arrived in the form of gun control. I know, this is a weird topic for a psychologist to take on, and I am not presenting a stance for or against in this blog. However, I feel strongly about your privacy, and the new reality is that if you have ever been on a psychotropic medication, this is now on your permanent, electronic medical record. And the government has sent a recommendation to physicians that they query the presence of guns in your home. The inevitable conclusion? Your medical record thus becomes the vehicle by which your rights can be taken away. One must ask, what other way might be found for your personal medical information to be used to your detriment? What other rights are at risk when your physician records the answers to non-medical questions and when everything you tell her and everything she discovers or speculates about you is placed in a permanent, electronic file?
