Remember this. I expect every piece of data given out to the government or to private organizations to sit in the databases of every major intelligence agency, and will not be surprise if it's all exposed to the public domain through data aggregation companies in near future.
i don't expect corporate databases to be secure. but, if/when single-payer healthcare is implemented in the US, data leaks and breaches will occur often.
i guess the difference is optical: instead of blaming the evil corporations, we'll blame the evil government.
Note: single payer healthcare systems are about who pays, not who provides -- it's even in the name. So here, hospitals and clinics provide healthcare while the government pays those hospitals and clinics. There's no reason for the government to know John Doe's enlarged prostate medication because that's between the doctor and patient.
> if/when single-payer healthcare is implemented in the US, data leaks and breaches will occur often
Can you provide numerous links to stories about Medicare and Medicaid personal data being exposed to the public? And if so, do those breaches outweigh the cost of (in the single payer case) millions of people without healthcare, increased costs, and worse health outcomes?
Unless the government is paying for it and expects to know exactly what it's paying for.
To embellish on this point, if you have a system where the government doesn't know what John Doe's healthcare providers are billing for and blindly cuts a cheque, expect to have lots of John Does having lots of very-expensive procedures.
Money is not the problem in the Charlie Gard case.
The case is not between the parents and the government, it's between the parents, the child, and the hospital. The child has received world class medical treatment; the hospital can't just kill the child (as would happen in the US, and happens every day) - the hospital has to go to a court and persuade a judge. The parents have their legal representation (and you can say that they should have been eligible for legal aid), the child has his own legal representation paid for by the state, and his own guardian to represent his best interests.
The judgements are all available to read. Here's a search that returns all of them: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/?s=yates+and+gard
And here are a couple of blogs:
http://barristerblogger.com/2017/07/16/open-letter-charlie-g...
http://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2017/07/07/never-let-an-...
It's been my experience (anecdotal as a person in a family of 8 MD's including pediatricians) that the US actually keeps people alive way past the point where it's appropriate to do so - family has the right to force emergency life-saving procedures and hospice-type end-of-life care isn't as common.
Actually, reading the blogs, that's what the parents are trying to do - send the kid to the US in an attempt to save his life, and the UK says that's cruel and he should be allowed to die.
Have I totally misread this?
Similarly, for non-life-threatening health issues, you'll get emergency care that treats the immediate symptoms of whatever your problem is (and you'll get billed for them, and be expected to pay), but you get no treatment for the problem itself.
Needless to say, this is a very wasteful system.
> i guess the difference is optical: instead of blaming the evil corporations, we'll blame the evil government.
No, that's a huge difference mate.
There are definitely downsides (corporations having access to this will get annoying), but some of us (me and (I think) you) are already living as if this is the case, and this would teach people that this is the world we live in and remove some inefficiencies and let people build things like a global facial-recognition based authentication system.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/25/one-id...
Way to beat them at their own game. It doesn't make it any less asinine.