From Overlawyered:
[T]he New York City government has begun “legally requiring laboratories that do medical testing to report to the
Health Department the results of blood-sugar tests for city residents with diabetes — along with the names, ages, and contact
information on those patients. City officials are not only analyzing these data to assess patterns and changes in diabetes
prevalence in the city, but are planning ‘interventions.’ … If you wish to keep your medical data confidential, you cannot.”
Coercive public-health techniques originally seen as needed to combat communicable and infectious disease will now be deployed in
hopes of correcting less-than-healthy individual behavior.
I’m trying to figure out how the heck they’re justifying this sort of breach of privacy. This sort of action is what I fear most
whenever talk about moving to an all-government-run healthcare system is raised — that the government will begin to meddle in the
niggling details of ones life because the state has a financial interest in doing so.
Perhaps New York City perceives a threat to its public health system due to the seemingly epidemic rise in the occurrence of
diabetes….I don’t know. However, I have to admit that it’s not that much of a jump in my paranoid mind to imagine folks being
sent to jail…er, “mandatory nutritional education camps” because they choose to eat a little too much junk food.
Perhaps I should stock up now on Twinkies in anticipation of a black market in such goodies arising in the future. After all, don’t
Twinkies keep forever?