It's a deep-seated tendency in mammals to hide sickness, and therefore the confidentiality in healthcare settings is essential to get people to seek care in time.
If you're underage you may especially want to hide those two from your parents depending on the social group. If you're a woman you may also want those two hidden from your family depending on the social group. Sweden has a large refuge population from very conservative cultures and things like acid attacks against women are decently common. So not keeping those thing hidden can get you killed or horribly injured if you're in certain social groups.
Wait, what? Where's your source on this.
Via google I can find references to one case from 1997 and one from 2002, and that's it. The idea that this would in any way be "decently common" here is preposterous.
London Metropolitan Police showed a sharp rise in attacks, with 465 recorded in 2017
Particularly common in London, and amongst some immigrant communities. Other countries are not so far behind, and I gather it is quite common in some of the developing world, like India and Pakistan.
Seems like it may have been noticed being used for honour attacks in communities in London, Bradford, Leicester etc, and escalated from there. A particularly horrible form of attack.
In any case the leak of health information is nothing to laugh at e.g. for those who live under threat of "honor violence".
[1] https://www.na.se/artikel/hallefors/man-i-hallefors-anhallen...
You can be blackmailed because you have or had a "shameful" disease, a potential employer can deny you a job because you were too often sick for his own taste, insurance might deny you because you have a too risky profile, ...
Lots of information is available in Sweden that would make Americans squeemish to have public. The difference is that most people aren't interested in the sordid details of their neighbors.
Makes a lot of sense as well, anything else would be weird. If this was not the case you could just get it when you have already been deemed sick, to get the faster private care instead of public health care.
These kinds of laws exists in most country, but if you cannot prove it, they are useless. So if a employer has a public access to your health record, what you prevent him from doing the above and tell you a random reason ?
There was a case in France were an Ikea director has access to private police record and was making hiring decision based on that. It's completely illegal but they did it for years before getting caught.
Kind of a rough argument, but maybe it's just because they have never been beaten or harassed over something about their medical history. Which is good for them, but not the world most of us live in.
Even worse, people with dementia are prone to being scammed. We need to do everything possible to stop adversaries and scammers from having a list of people with neurodegenerative disease. Unfortunately, most people have little fear of their health data being hacked and hospitals have little incentive to protect it. Although I hear things are "getting better," the protection of you health data remains in a terrible state.