Author: Dissent

Elizabeth Fernandez reports in the San Francisco Chronicle: Joan Broner, like many people, never reads the fine print at her medical appointments. As a consequence, the 58-year-old San Francisco resident, who has arthritis, regularly receives solicitation letters at home from several local hospitals. The letters infuriate her. “It feels like an invasion of privacy,” she…

Each new identity card to be introduced next year would contain an electronic chip containing the individual’s health record, Communications Minister Austin Gatt told Parliament yesterday. Moving the second reading of the Central Registry Bill, he said the information would be linked to Mater Dei Hospital, health clinics and, in time, to general practitioners’ clinics….

  Zack Kaldveer of the Consumer Federation of California writes: The California Senate rejected a bill this week by a vote of 17 to 17 (21 needed to “pass”) that would have allowed the sharing of a patient’s confidential medical information regarding prescription drugs among a pharmacy, third party corporations and pharmaceutical companies. The bill…

Lauran Neergaard reports: Woodrow Wilson’s secret stroke. Grover Cleveland’s secret cancer surgery. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretly worsening heart disease at the world-changing Yalta Conference. Notice a lot of secrets? While the public knows far more today about the health of its presidents and presidential candidates than ever before, do we know enough? And does knowing…

Rhys Thomas of the Hucknall Dispatch reports: Personal files of more than 100 parents and children were left behind in an apparently shocking disregard for privacy when a Hucknall nursery moved premises. The discovery was made at the derelict former site of the Rocking Horse Day Nursery, on Watnall Road, after a tip-off to the…

Erika Martinez reports in the NY Post: Two information specialists at a Brooklyn hospital stand accused of swiping patient information to open bogus credit-card accounts and shop online while working. Jessica Paul, 23, and Jessica Darden, 20, of Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park, accessed patient files and ran the names through a credit-check Web…