While I have bared some of my most private parts here, I am really a very private person. I value my privacy and I respect the privacy of those around me. That’s just the way I am.

It was interesting reading this article at S.F. Gate this morning. Apparantly medical researchers are miffed that a new federal privacy law prevents them from “troll[ing] through patient charts” to further their projects.

I remember being told that my cancer diagnosis had to be reported to California’s Cancer Registry by BorgHealth, but never really thought that much about it. I guess I just assumed faceless bureaucrats would compile statistical reports that no one reads. I had no idea my private information would then be provided to private researchers so they could decide whether to pitch me for their research programs and clinical trials.

I’m certainly not one to argue for less medical research. For various reasons and through numerous procedures and treatments over the last forty years, I owe a lot to modern medicine.

If someone asked to review my medical records for academic or research purposes, I would probably say yes.

But they are my records. They are records of some of the most intimate details of my life and I am the one these people should be asking for permission, not the legislature, not the congress, and not the courts.

Perhaps most annoying to me was this paragraph:

UC lawyers also maintain that there is nothing in state law that requires university hospitals to provide cancer records in less than six months, and that the Cancer Registry has no right to review the charts of patients who do not have cancer — something the Cancer Registry has done routinely when it conducts “quality control” audits to be sure a hospital is accurately reporting all cancer cases.

Big YAY for the UC lawyers. Beyond this cancer registry, this is what scares me about big government. Despite my profound belief that some type of health care reform is necessary in this country, I’ve never seen a reform proposal I could support. The reason is quite simply that after nine years working for the federal government and getting periodic physicals, including four years overseas with federal doctors acting as my primary care providers, I never want government bureaucrats accessing my medical records again. I won’t go into details about why (that’s what privacy is all about); I just don’t want it to every happen again.

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