In this podcast, Deborah Peel, MD of the Patient Privacy Rights foundation joins Michael Ostolenk to preview an upcoming conference addressing the increasing inappropriate access government, corporations, and other third parties have to confidential medical records. “Getting IT Right: Protecting Patient Privacy Rights in a Wired World” is the nation’s first open and inclusive public forum to discuss the future of health privacy in the digital age. The conference will be held June 13, 2011 at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C. and is the result of a partnership between the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, the premier health privacy advocacy organization in the United States. A complete agenda and registration information is available at http://www.healthprivacysummit.org
The Michael Ostrolenk Show
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National Electronic records have made my doctor appear to have joined “the enemy”. This was coming long ago. A young MD put “nicotine addiction” on my records and I saw the writing on the wall. Any illness I developed would then be due to smoking. I have since quit but that will be on my record and any illness developed in my senior years linked to that.
My picture was taken recently – didn’t see that one coming, was sitting on the examining table waiting for the doc to come in and the nurse flashed the camera in my face. So if you ever smoked or your BMI over the accepted range, any illness you have will not be covered.
Maybe this will scare some folks, like me, and I will become more responsible for my own health and my own care. My grandma lived to 87 and that was before Medicare! In my opinion, Medicare was the beginning of our healthcare crisis. When the private companies saw Medicare paying 10% of the fee, they said “we can do this also”. It’s all gone downhill since then. We should scrap Medicare/Medicaid and pay doctors what they’re worth. We’ve been spoiled with co-pays and ridiculously low patient payments. If we had to pay a fair share, it would limit trivial visits and maybe we’d all wake up and take better care with our lifestyles. I limit visits as it is, especially as while waiting in the waiting-room I see the parade of pharmaceutical representatives coming and going. Prescribed drugs have killed more people in the USA than guns! Poisons like “Lipitor” and “Fosamax” that are almost forced on you. You have to be your own researcher, chemist, pharmacist and keep up with these things or risk injury or death.