Bush drops protection on medical files “The Bush administration on Friday officially eliminated many protections for the privacy of medical records by issuing final rules that allow doctors and hospitals to distribute patients’ health information without the patients’ written approval.” Chicago Tribune

A reader asked me to comment on this move. I started getting incensed, and wrote about it, when these changes were first proposed several months ago. This is, simply, a travesty and a giveaway to Bush’s friends in the healthcare and insurance industries. Just as they did with the estate tax reform, Administration arguments about the benefits to the little guy (under the restrictive Clinton regulations, what would a pharmacist do for written consent for a prescription that had been phoned in and was being picked up by a relative?) serve to obscure the corporate giveaway at the heart of this plan. Don’t listen to any arguments about making clinical communication more efficient; this is all about making fiscal communication about a patient’s history more efficient and less controlled by the true owner of your health information, you. Patients with fewer safeguards will probably be less willing to speak in candor to their physicians and physicians less likely to record sensitive facts.