National Health ID Plan

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Lead story, The New York Times, July 20, 1998:

Clinton Plans to Assign Codes, as Law Requires, to 
Create Giant Medical Database 

As legislation that would protect patient privacy languishes 
in Congress, the Clinton Administration is quietly laying 
plans to assign every American a "unique health identifier," 
a computer code that could be used to create a national 
database that would track every citizen's medical history 
from cradle to grave.
 
The electronic code was mandated by a 1996 law and would be 
the first comprehensive national identification system since 
the Social Security number was introduced in 1935. Although 
the idea has attracted almost no public attention, it is so 
contentious that Federal health officials who were supposed 
to propose a plan for the identifier by February, have made 
little headway and are instead holding hearings beginning on 
Monday to solicit public comment. 

Proponents, including insurance companies and public health 
researchers, say the benefits would be vast. Doctors and 
hospitals would be able to monitor the health of patients as 
they switch from one insurance plan to the next. Patients 
would not have to wade through a cumbersome bureaucracy to 
obtain old records. Billing would be streamlined, saving money. 
A national disease database could be created, offering 
unlimited opportunities for scientific study. 

But opponents, including privacy advocates and some doctors' 
groups, say the code smacks of Big Brother. They warn that 
sensitive health information might be linked to financial data 
or criminal records and that already tenuous privacy protections 
would be further weakened as existing managed care databases, 
for example, are linked. They say that trust in doctors, already 
eroded by managed care, would deteriorate further, with patients 
growing reluctant to share intimate details. And in a world 
where computer hackers can penetrate the Pentagon's computer 
system, they ask, will anyone's medical records be safe? 

Full story: http://www.nytimes.com

Mirror: http://jya.com/privacy-hit.htm

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There's also a short report on House Commerce Committee
passage of the WIPO copyright act (which limits encryption 
testing) by setting temporary provisions for "fair use" for 
education with bi-annual review by the Commerce Department 
to extend or let lapse:

Mirror: http://jya.com/wipo-hit.htm