Live on the Internet: Your Medicine Cabinet!
How'd you like to train an Internet camera on your medicine cabinet, and just let the world see what drugs you're taking? Blood pressure medication? Statins? An AIDS drug cocktail? Tamoxifen to prevent a recurrence of cancer? Today's Washington Post tells us that electronic databases of prescription drug usage are already open to health insurers--and the risk that the information will slip into a wider sphere is real.
Insurers eager to keep from paying claims can now buy your "drug score," drawn by for-profit companies from the electronic databases that store pharmacy information. Unlike credit scores, a high drug score means high risk--maybe you're taking drugs that treat serious or chronic conditions. If you try to buy an individual insurance policy, the company can reject you or charge you stratospheric rates based on the drug score alone. Yet, unlike with credit scores, you have no way to challenge or correct that data. Some insurers are also finding was to access your medical tests and treatment history.
The drug score, a completely legal breach of your personal information, is here to stay as long as insurance companies can pick and choose their customers in the individual market. The information is also being put to other perverse use, as in mailed "reminders" to take your prescribed drugs that are really just advertisements for other brand-name drugs.
If everyone had access to health care and no one could be turned down, your medicine cabinet and health history could stay private, or at least stay between you and your doctor. But once these databases are assembled, and once they are commercialized, your data is only one bribe, one hacker or one legal loophole away from escaping altogether.
Lenders
would love to be able to base your mortgage interest rate on a health
score. Employers who could find out the health status of job applicants
could weed out the breast cancer survivors.
Given the uneven patchwork of laws covering pharmacy information, it is all too likely that your medicine cabinet will be viewed by more sellers who want to cut their risks. The only certain cure is health care that doesn't depend on insurers placing bets on your "riskiness." If insurance companies don't need the information, the risk that others will gain access to it can be shut off.