Secrecy in the Health Care System

One difficulty in having an open discussion about the architecture of the health care system and the roadmap going forward is that there are national security interests involved. While much of the information about approved drugs and treatments are public information, there is also much that is not public due to military and security considerations. This means that some of the institutions involved in health care will not be able to transparently discuss their roles in the system. So while a public roadmap for the system is necessary to build confidence that the health care reform plan is incrementally moving toward a direction other than socialism, the evidence must be incomplete.

Secrecy is necessary from the point of view of competition among nations as well as from the point of view of keeping knowledge from those that could cause us harm. For other countries that have already taken a socialist route, it is easier to preserve the secrecy throughout the system as an extension of the government. The United States and other countries that seek to emulate our model have a more difficult challenge to preserve a part of the health care system as private, with individuals in control of their information.

Private citizens will have access to information that is not secret, therefore they control the part of their medical history that applies to known diseases and treatments. They can provide this information with their consent to their physicians and hospitals. However, they will have no record of treatments they may have been subjected to without their consent. If national security requires that government acts on private citizens without their knowledge, these medical records will be incomplete.

For more information, regarding national security implications of health care disclosures please reference my blog: Identity and Its Implications at http://fogofdeceit.blogspot.com