Since when did insurance companies become doctor advisors? That's very alarming.
The whole concept of unsuspecting data sharing is wrong, disturbing and should have everyone concerned.
A friend of ours was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma a few years ago at 25. Before she was diagnosed, she had gone to the hospital feeling sick and achy. After a full, 12+ hours at the hospital, it was clear she had some kind of cancer. Imaging showed she had a baseball sized tumor in her chest. One more test was needed to confirm which variety so a course of treatment could be prescribed. It was already quite late (after 11pm) and the hospital staff said she could just come back in the morning to finish the one remaining test. The next morning, she went back to the hospital and was denied the test.
Apparently, some inhuman garbage at her insurance company had decided in the middle of the night that they could save a little money by forcing her to do the test in a clinic setting. Since she hadn’t officially received her cancer diagnosis, she had to wait another four weeks to get the required test. Every day the tumor growing a little bigger.
She’s doing fine now by the way! She lost her insurance after turning 26, but did benefit from impeccable timing - she got one of the first Obamacare plans, it probably saved her life.
If you want to, you can make this sound sinister. But it's pretty common, and the reason behind it is simple.
Many people who need medical care do not see a single doctor for all of their needs. They have a primary doctor, but also see one or more specialists, perhaps have occasional visits with a nurse, deal with a pharmacist, may sometimes need to go to a clinic that's open on a day they can't get an appointment with their regular primary doctor, etc. etc.
Out of that potentially large pool of providers, how many do you think are automatically and quickly sharing full records with the primary doctor? How many others of them receive that level of records from the primary doctor and from all the other providers? How many of them even know about all the others' existence?
This is a genuine problem, because it means that none of them see the full picture of the patient's health. They see isolated bits and pieces of it. And that's dangerous. Pharmacists get a reputation as the last line of defense for many people against different doctors -- ignorant of each others' existence -- unknowingly prescribing badly-interacting and possibly fatal combinations of medications to a single patient, for example.
In the US system (and this is not an endorsement of it), there is exactly one entity that sees everything: the payer (i.e., insurance). All of those providers want to get paid for their services, so every one of them submits claims to the payer, including details of diagnoses, procedures, and so on.
Given this status as the only entity which actually sees the whole picture, it makes a lot of sense to be sharing that information with the medical providers who see the patient. This is part of the original idea behind the HMO model of health insurance (where all the providers are a single super-entity coordinating with each other), though it comes with the widely-hated downside of being unable to see a doctor who isn't part of the HMO. And for many years, even PPO-model insurance plans have introduced more and more active collaboration with providers.
The doctors prescribe different medications.
The patient goes to two different pharmacists to pick them up.
In a victory for privacy, the patient dies from a fatal interaction of the prescribed medications.
In the US there is a strong medical privacy law. And it includes an exception for providers of medical care to share treatment information with each other, for precisely this reason. Even so, every single time you see a doctor in the US, you are handed a notice saying they'll share information for permitted purposes (the triad of "TPO" -- Treatment, Payment, and Operations), and given a form to sign saying you have been made aware of this.
The point was to be an illustrative example of why it can be useful for health-care providers to share information. HN, predictably, took it as a challenge to try to work around and find as many possible ways to hide the information as they could.
You could extend your argument that insurance companies should get access to what food and drinks you buy so they prevent side effects(and not at all tax you more because you drink beer or eat cheap food a lot)
Also if you're seeing multiple doctors (like, for example, a general practitioner and a specialist) you should be transparent on what prescriptions you're already taking.
Being an idiot and getting yourself killed is not the doctors fault.
In one country, I visit any doctor and they have my full medical history, despite not living there.
In another country, every time I visit the same doctor, they somehow don't have any files for me and I have to sign up as a new patient, despite being born and resident there.
It's all shambles, but in both cases, I get healthcare for free so it could be a lot worse.
I think it's non-ideal, but the health insurance should never need to know whether you're using your CPAP. They should only know if the doctor prescribed it.
Information should be shared with the pharmacy and other doctors. That would be helpful and would save lives.
[1] https://ds.ccc.de/download.html (german)