Friday, May 05, 2006

Big Brother Arrives in NYC

From Overlawyered:

the New York City government has begun "legally requiring laboratories that do medical testing to report to the Health Department the results of blood-sugar tests for city residents with diabetes -- along with the names, ages, and contact information on those patients. City officials are not only analyzing these data to assess patterns and changes in diabetes prevalence in the city, but are planning 'interventions.' ... If you wish to keep your medical data confidential, you cannot." Coercive public-health techniques originally seen as needed to combat communicable and infectious disease will now be deployed in hopes of correcting less-than-healthy individual behavior. Where's HIPAA, the manically overbroad federal patient-privacy law, now that it might actually do some good?

Somehow I recall that this stuff is supposed to be Federally protected private info--except (perhaps) NYC health Nazis have found exception under 'communicable/infectious'...

2 comments:

Dave said...

Could be challenged in court...OTOH, NY agencies could be arrogant enough to defy SCOTUS...

Dad29 said...

Yeah, it could be challenged--but by WHOM?

ACLU is a possible, but they're statists. Maybe a Conservative pro-bono type...