Boycott Walmart

According to Information Week, Intel, Wal-mart and BP are joining together to build a huge data warehouse to help their employees manage there health care.

Impatient with the health care industry's slow pace of change, Intel, Wal-Mart, and the others are pooling their information, technology acumen, and clout as buyers to force the U.S. system to be more cost conscious. "Health care is pricing itself out of business," Intel's (chairman Craig) Barrett told a health care conference in September, arguing that those costs are one reason the United States loses jobs to other countries. "If we can use our purchasing power to drive massive adoption of technology and procedures and best known methods which provide better care at lower cost, we ought to get into that debate."

This seems fine on the surface, but quite frankly I don't want my employer to know anything about my health records, and I certainly don't want them being responsible for storing them and neither does the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.

Patient Privacy Rights Foundation today denounced the plan by Wal-Mart Stores, Intel, and others, to store their employees’ records in a centralized data warehouse linking hospitals, doctors and pharmacies.

“This is a prescription for disaster,” said Deborah Peel, MD, founder and chair of patient Privacy Rights. “Employees’ sensitive medical records will be held in an employer-controlled database. Will these companies guarantee that employees’ personal health information will never be used against them or disclosed without informed consent?”

Patient Privacy Rights recommends:
* Patient data should not be housed by employers; instead, it should be housed by a neutral third-party such as a health banking repository owned by consumers.

* Employees should control access to their own data.

* Employees should be asked permission before any individual or business entity can access their health information.

* Employers should never be allowed to access or use the data, even if “de-identified”.

* Employers should never be allowed to require that employees’ permit them to access medical data as a condition for employment or insurance coverage.

Unless these conditions are met, Patient Privacy Rights urges patients not to participate in this plan.

The timing of this story is somewhat ironic, because my parents have decided to boycott Wal-mart recently because of their labor practices. It seems if you work for Wal-mart, you are essentially on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and can be called in at any time for any reason with limited or no notice. If you are unable or refuse to come, then you risk losing your job. This practice is deplorable, it is not as if Wal-mart employee is like a doctor who needs to be on call 100% of the time because no lives are at stake here, other than the person working for $7/hour trying to make a living.

I think I am going to join my parents on this boycott for the labor practices and trying to force their employees into the system described above. Wal-mrt has come to believe that because they are the largest retail operation in the world, that they can essentially squeeze every operational dollar out of their suppliers, vendors, employees, and anyone else doing business with them, and this has to stop. While I admire the capitalistic pursuit, they certainly seemed to have crossed an ethical line in my mind and for that I will no longer patronize Wal-mart. Please join me, if enough consumers stop going then maybe they will get the message. Somehow, I seriously doubt even if everyone stopped going to Wal-mart, then they still would not get the message, that is the problem with arrogance.

Added 12/8 - Information Week posted some survey results on this issue, which are quite interesting:

Nearly two-thirds -- 65% -- of U.S. consumers want personal electronic health records, but 80% of them have concerns about the misuse and security of their information.

Seventy-five percent also say they think the government should have a role in establishing rules to protect privacy and confidentiality of online health data.

This last stat scares me to the core, since the government roles should only to set up a 100% completely independent agency for oversight of independent companies that will manage my digital files. Quite frankly, I don't want my employer, nor the government anywhere near my health records. Talk about taking a big step towards the ultimate big brother society, with totalatarian capabilities and suspension of all civil liberties. But hey, that is just me. This kind of government intervention always make me think about that scene from Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where Palpatine becomes Emperor in order to make the republic safer and Padme says:

So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.