We Will Probably Learn Your Medical History

On Wednesday, June 3rd, the Washington Post reported that "a U.S. document containing sensitive details about hundreds of civilian nuclear sites across the country was posted online Monday, an apparently inadvertent security breach that had federal officials scrambling yesterday to remedy the mistake."

Turns out that a 267-page document, listing locations of facilities that store enriched uranium and other material used in nuclear weapons, was available for about a day on a Government Printing Office web site.  Inquiries from news organizations prompted its withdrawal.

How does this impact your health care?  One word:  privacy.  The Obama Administration and Congress want the federal government to have a dominant, potentially all-encompassing role in Americans' health care.  This role will include the need to collect and store MASSIVE amounts of sensitive information about almost every Americans' health.

Think that the list of U.S. nuclear sites being posted online is just an anomaly?  Here are some other breaches of sensitive information supposedly held "secure" by the federal government:

• In March 2008, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirmed that a laptop containing unsecured information about 2,500 participants enrolled in a cardiac study by its National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) was stolen from the trunk of a researcher's car.
  
• In May 2006, the Veterans Affairs Department admitted a theft of a VA laptop and hard drive containing sensitive data for up to 26.5 million veterans and their spouses.
• In July 2006, a thief stole an Office of Inspector General Special Agent’s laptop computer from a locked government vehicle in Doral, Florida, near Miami.  This laptop contained individuals' name plus other identifying information such as Social Security number or date of birth for thousands of Florida residents. 
  
• In August 2006, another VA laptop was stolen that contained thousands of unsecured records of VA patients that had been treated in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh medical facilities.
  

Mind you, these are events reported on the first page of a simple Google search for government security breaches.  My mindfulness of my readers' patience prevents me from listing page after page of supposedly secure sensitive information being released into the public domain.

Having a list of nuclear facilities and millions of Social Security numbers being accidentally released publicly is bad enough.  Having medical histories being posted on the Internet?  Terrible but -- sadly -- also probably inevitable.