Health privacy sits at an uncomfortable junction between three interests: individual human rights, public / population health, and private business interests. There’s no obvious reason for these three interests to be misaligned but a lot of pain and money are involved so either politics or competition are typically in the picture.
Health privacy is a subset of the human right to privacy, what Supreme Court Justice Brandeis called “the right to be left alone”. But privacy has never been defined, and is seldom enforced, in health care because of the competing interests of society to manage populations, and a $100 Billion industry in data brokerage that’s hidden from public view. Big Healthcare business seeks our trust on the one hand while doing their best to manipulate prices on the other.
In August 1989, Chicago Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski, then Chairman of the “powerful” House Ways and Means Committee, narrowly escaped an angry mob of seniors in his own district who attacked his car with umbrellas. His crime: eliminating the gaping patient financial exposure built into the Medicare program in 1965 by raising taxes on the “high income” elderly. In November, 1989 Congress rescinded the so-called Catastrophic Coverage Act, a bipartisan reform signed into law by Ronald Reagan 
The adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has increased substantially in hospitals and clinician offices in large part due to the “meaningful use” program of the Health Information Technology for Clinical and Economic Health (HITECH) Act. The motivation for increasing EHR use in the HITECH Act was supported by evidence-based interventions for known significant problems in healthcare.
The world is reeling from the massive ransomware attack on at least a hundred nations’ computer systems. The unprecedented malware spasm infected hundreds of thousands of computers, and would have infected millions more but for a 22-year old computer science student who found a vulnerability in the malware that he used to curtail the infection. He found it looked for a non-existent URL, so he a set up that URL and found he could stop it spreading. Of course, now the hackers know that, it is an easy matter to update the malware to use other URLs and other techniques. Clearly, this iconic malware attack is not going to be the last.
