More scary paternalism in the name of public health from the Bloomberg crew: 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? (Elizabeth Whelan, “Big Brother Will See You Now”, National Review Online, Apr. 25).
NYC plans “interventions” with diabetics
More scary paternalism in the name of public health from the Bloomberg crew: 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. […]
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I don’t live in NYC, but I do work here, so I’m worried about this expanding to my area as well. I have diabetes, and take pretty good care of myself, but I’ll be damned if the government wants to be second guessing my results.
Fascist Health Care
Via Overlawyered comes this story from the National Review about how the NYC government is forcing hospitals and labs to forward test results to the city, including patient names and addresses. Officals are planning to use the data to not only …
Fascist Health Care
Via Overlawyered comes this story from the National Review about how the NYC government is forcing hospitals and labs to forward test results to the city, including patient names and addresses. Officals are planning to use the data to not only …
Not being a lawyer I have to ask this. Since federal law seems to trump state law won’t these people have grounds to sue these labs under HIPAA?
How would NYC enforce this on out of town labs?
The NY Times did have several articles on diabetes in the city and this new regulation which calls into question how well researched this article really is.
All “warning” letters must include a full figure photo and vitals – age, height, weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar – of the person signing the letter.