For me, the cost/benefit ratio of electronic records is worth it. I've had a spate of bad medical luck in the last couple months and ended up at the hospital in Leesburg and in The Villages, plus ER visits and multiple doctors in both cities, and all of them were able to pull up my charts and test results. For me, the continuity of care is more important and the chance of privacy violations less so.
Admittedly, since I'm still working and covered by group medical, the possibility of being turned down by insurance companies or by a potential employer don't apply to me, but I agree those are legitimate concerns about the system.
In general, I care about my SSN and financial records but don't shred prescription bottles or scrape the labels off before recycling because it doesn't worry me if some random stranger at the sorting plant can see that some random person with the same name as me takes omeprazole.
Tugging the privacy topic sideways a bit -- I do very much wonder how all the online tracking and monitoring is going to come back and bite us. I was trying to set up a free Android phone app recently and never could get it to work so uninstalled it. I then noticed a charge from Google Voice for $25 on my credit card. On my active credit card (I only keep one), which I had not given the app people. I suppose at some point I used Google checkout for online shopping and boy, they saved that info.
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