Psychoanalyst Dr. Deborah Peel told WND most patients don't know that their highly sensitive information is being shared with thousands of law-enforcement agencies, insurance brokers, life and health insurance companies, credit bureaus, transcription vendors, disease registries, employers and banks every day – and the data can be used to discriminate against Americans. ...
Legal users of patient medical records
Zone 1 includes the patient and his doctor. When a patient makes an office visit, private health information can be legally shared with Zone 2 "covered entities," including health and life insurance companies, labs, pharmacy benefits managers, insurance brokers, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, disease registries, law-enforcement agencies, medical information bureaus, public health agencies, self-insured employers, hospital chains, third-party administrators and even the Food and Drug Administration.
By Zone 3, private health information may be shared with credit bureaus, legal services, hospital staff, data clearinghouses, data processing firms, pharmacy chains, pharmaceutical companies, accounting firms and even offshore transcription vendors as far away as Pakistan.
"Entities, like a hospital or doctor's office, have accountants, lawyers, people to maintain websites. If they have electronic software, they have many software and IT vendors that create the databases that hold and share and store the information and so forth," Peel said. "Those people get a hold of the information, too."
By Zone 4, the information may reach financial institutions, holding companies, banks and investment companies. She said banks can freely trade information with credit bureaus.
Asked whether those companies keep the private health information on file, Peel replied, "Oh absolutely. It's very scary. There's nothing regulating when they destroy information, nothing. Even if we had rules about them destroying it, who is going to follow up?"
A Chance To Turn Around The FDA by Henry Miller November 12, 2008 At a time when drug development should have been spurred by huge increases in R&D expenditures — which tripled to more than $45 billion between 1995 and 2007 — and by the exploitation of numerous new technologies, drug approvals have actually dropped. The 19 new medicines approved in 2007 was the lowest figure in 24 years, and 2008 approvals are running behind last year's.
Bringing a new drug to market now requires on average 12 to 15 years, and costs have skyrocketed to more than $1.2 billion — in no small part because the average length of a clinical trial increased 70% between 1999 and 2006. Perhaps the most ominous statistic of all is that drug manufacturers recoup their R&D costs for only one in five approved drugs.
The Surgeon General estimated obesity kills 300,000 Americans annually and cost the economy over $100 billion in 2000. Link
How U.S. Health Care Really Stacks Up by Investor's Business Daily March 26, 2009 Yes, with $2.5 trillion expected to be spent this year, health care in the U.S. is more expensive than in any other country, including Great Britain and Canada, whose nationalized, universal care systems are held up as models .
But what we spend isn't thrown down a rathole. The National Center for Policy Analysis has published a study, "10 Surprising Facts About American Health Care," that shows how Americans get something for the extra dollars they lay out. To wit: