> “Any governmental assurances to keep your data safe have as much value as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory.”
Remember this. I expect every piece of data given out to the government or to private organizations to sit in the databases of every major intelligence agency, and will not be surprise if it's all exposed to the public domain through data aggregation companies in near future.
i don't expect corporate databases to be secure. but, if/when single-payer healthcare is implemented in the US, data leaks and breaches will occur often.
i guess the difference is optical: instead of blaming the evil corporations, we'll blame the evil government.
> also an aspect of a single-payer healthcare plan?
Note: single payer healthcare systems are about who pays, not who provides -- it's even in the name. So here, hospitals and clinics provide healthcare while the government pays those hospitals and clinics. There's no reason for the government to know John Doe's enlarged prostate medication because that's between the doctor and patient.
> if/when single-payer healthcare is implemented in the US, data leaks and breaches will occur often
Can you provide numerous links to stories about Medicare and Medicaid personal data being exposed to the public? And if so, do those breaches outweigh the cost of (in the single payer case) millions of people without healthcare, increased costs, and worse health outcomes?
> the government is paying for it and expects to know exactly what it's paying for
To embellish on this point, if you have a system where the government doesn't know what John Doe's healthcare providers are billing for and blindly cuts a cheque, expect to have lots of John Does having lots of very-expensive procedures.
Only if it's federal single-payer, rather than state-by-state (the latter is quite possible - it's how Canada does it). And assuming the existing law wrt taxes and abortions stays in place, of course, which I doubt if we ever get close to the numbers necessary to pass federal single-payer.
I think the Charlie Gard case proves your first point wrong. The government absolutely will know in such a system, it has to in order to decide how limited medical care resources will be distributed. Every citizen won't be able to receive an unlimited amount of expensive healthcare procedures.
The Gard case has nothing to do with ability to pay. Cost of care wasn't a feature of any of the decisions or of any of the various court cases.
Money is not the problem in the Charlie Gard case.
The case is not between the parents and the government, it's between the parents, the child, and the hospital. The child has received world class medical treatment; the hospital can't just kill the child (as would happen in the US, and happens every day) - the hospital has to go to a court and persuade a judge. The parents have their legal representation (and you can say that they should have been eligible for legal aid), the child has his own legal representation paid for by the state, and his own guardian to represent his best interests.
Does that actually happen in the US every day? The hospital is keeping a kid alive, they decide it's better to kill the kid, so they kill the kid? Am I misreading you or is that what you're saying happens?
It's been my experience (anecdotal as a person in a family of 8 MD's including pediatricians) that the US actually keeps people alive way past the point where it's appropriate to do so - family has the right to force emergency life-saving procedures and hospice-type end-of-life care isn't as common.
Actually, reading the blogs, that's what the parents are trying to do - send the kid to the US in an attempt to save his life, and the UK says that's cruel and he should be allowed to die.
US will provide emergency care (although someone will still get billed for it - if not the patient, then their parents). But that literally means emergency, like life support. If what you require in order to not let the illness progress to the point where you need life support is some expensive surgery, and you don't have insurance that covers that, you're not getting it.
Similarly, for non-life-threatening health issues, you'll get emergency care that treats the immediate symptoms of whatever your problem is (and you'll get billed for them, and be expected to pay), but you get no treatment for the problem itself.
The Gard case didn't have anything to do with limited resources. The parents, doctors, and courts were arguing over what was in Charlie's best interest. There was no argument that his care had become too expensive.
No, it's not. Or at least not necessarily. Here in Norway all doctor offices and public hospitals are independently operated at some level (there are hospital regions though). We are however in the process of introducing a shared journal system which will result in all of these providers sharing information about patients. This information sharing is also something that can be done in fully privatised (aka uncivilised) systems such as in the USA, so it's not really a trait of public healthcare system. But while sharing the information has a lot of benefits, there is as you mentions huge risks with data breaches as data will be sent around. And something we have been discussing here in Norway recently due to a few outsourcing as well as software data access issues. But nothing compare to this case in Sweden.
> i guess the difference is optical: instead of blaming the evil corporations, we'll blame the evil government.
One difference is that corporations can be more easily taken to court. It's more difficult to hold the 'government' accountable without it being political. I don't necessarily know how to remedy that, but it's a different class of problem. Maybe there should be more personal liability for the individuals in these agencies?
We should open that data. Every single human would have a record in a freely accessible, distributed database with (at least) a highres full body shot, name and a date of birth. Maybe add "full DNA sequence" in there when it gets cheap enough.
There are definitely downsides (corporations having access to this will get annoying), but some of us (me and (I think) you) are already living as if this is the case, and this would teach people that this is the world we live in and remove some inefficiencies and let people build things like a global facial-recognition based authentication system.
You were right to use a throwaway. This is a stupid idea. Are you interested in fixing the problem and protecting people's information, or are you only interested in creating more surveillance and data minding opportunities for people?
Radical transparency has massive downsides, yes, but it's not completely black and white. I can see some interesting arguments for it as well as many against it.
Your comment says nothing. I'm glad you can think around a problem and tell me that you're capable of that, but what the Guardian is positing is "you can't steal our data if we give it to you!"
Way to beat them at their own game. It doesn't make it any less asinine.
Remember this. I expect every piece of data given out to the government or to private organizations to sit in the databases of every major intelligence agency, and will not be surprise if it's all exposed to the public domain through data aggregation companies in near future.