Bill would let pharmacies sell medical records

"Bill would let pharmacies sell medical records"

The California legistlature has a bill before it, authored Democratic Party State Senator Ron Calderon, which would let pharmacies sell their patient records to Drug Marketing companies so that they can market their drugs directly to people.

It's difficult to think of a more blatant violation of privacy rights. The whole point of patient privacy is that the only the patient, physician and pharmacist have the right to know what medications are prescribed. In many cases, even the patient's family don't know the medications that the patient is taking, for a host of good reasons.

Imagine if a marketing company had possession of this information and started calling the patient's house, or sending mail to the patients house. It's easy to see how easily the patients privacy could be violated.

And even if you weren't worried about that. People often feel very sensitive about their medications and they don't want to receive marketing messages about their medications. I can easily see how getting bombarded with marketng messages about their meds could cause some patients to stop taking them.

What's amazing to me is the double speak being used to defend this proposed legislation. A spokesman for the State Senator Calderon said, "The point is to tell people to take the drug as prescribed and to refill it."

Yeah, Right. Not that I can't imagine a company engaging in public service like that. But there's a fundamental marketing concept called "adjacent markets" which is to say you start with one market and send marketing messages for similar products or services to that market. For example, suppose a patient is taking a prescription acid reducer medicine. Why not market over the counter medicines to that patient as well. And on the assumption that stomach acid is highly correlated with stress, why not market stress relief programs to that person. The point is, even if the do as intended, which is to remind people to take their medicines and prescribed, who can believe they won't do additional marketing to them?

The other tactic Senator Calderon is using to try to sell this legislation is that it has an "opt out" provision. At the time that patient picks up the prescription, he or she would be gien a form to sign in order to opt out of sharing their information. That's so wrong.

As we've seen with those gazillions of HIPAA notices, people HATE having to sign those forms every time they pick up a prescription. Most people have no idea what they are signing when they sign those forms. So adding a second one would be just as bad and make an already complicated process even thatmuch more complicated.

It's incredibly hard to understand how Senator Calderon can square his responsibility to his constituents with this bill. Nothing says special interest group like this bill.

And what makes me doubly mad is that the legislators are starting to adopt the terminology of privacy protection and twisting it around to serve their privacy invading purposes.