There are so many serious problems raised by the nationalization of ,medicine that we cannot mention even all the more important ones. But there is one gravity of which the public has scarcely yet perceived and which is likely to be of greatest importance. This is the inevitable transformation of doctors, who have been members of a free profession primarily responsible to their patients, into paid servants of the state, officials who are necessarily subject to instruction by authority and who must be released from the duty of secrecy so far as authority is concerned. The most dangerous aspect of the new development may well prove to be that, at a time when the increase in medical knowledge tends to confer more and more power over the minds of men to those who possess it, they should be made dependent on a unified organization under a single direction and be guided by the same reasons of state that generally govern policy. A system that gives the indispensable helper of the individual, who is at the same time an agent of the state, an insight into the other's most intimate concerns and creates conditions in which he must reveal this knowledge to a superiors opens frightening prospects. The manner in which state medicine has been used in Russia as an instrument of industrial discipline* gives us a foretaste of the uses to which such a system can be put.I have yet to penetrate so far into the 1018 page monstrosity which is HR3200, so I don't know whether His Imperial Majesty's declared goal of putting all medical records in the internet is in there or not, or even whether there is a requirement that all medical records be made available to the Reichs Minister fur Gesundheitszustand.* However, considering the way that the .gov seems to have problems keeping the personal information of it's own employees under control, I gotta wonder just how secure our perosnal medical records will be.
*Footnote: Mark G. Field, " Doctor and Patient in Soviet Russia. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.)
And, if the People's Commisar for Wellness does decide that he or she needs to know your every little peccadillo which might have shown up in what had previously been your Hippocratic Oath-mandated private files...
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*Thank you, Google Toolbar Translator.
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