Medical Prying - Minnesota is

Medical Prying - Minnesota is doing its darnedest to beat the rest of the country to the goal of socialized medicine. Over the past decade, state mandates have driven the cost of health insurance into the "utterly unaffordable" range, ridden most of the traditional fee-for-service insurance providers out of the state, and via the fees brought more and more people to "MN-Care", our embryonic single-payer system.

Last week, an Administrative Law judge paved the way for the state to start collecting virtually all the medical data it wants to.

Blessedly, Governor-Elect Pawlenty opposes this:

``I understand the need for research,'' Pawlenty told KSTP-TV for its Sunday ``At Issue'' program. ``But I think this law goes too far in terms of collecting personally identifiable information relating to people's health conditions.''

The medical database would include everything from who has a stroke, an abortion or surgery to who takes Prozac. Health officials say information that identifies people would be either deleted or encrypted before it leaves the department in the form of a study or other release.

``I think they should be able to get the research done through generic fashion without identifying the individuals involved and I'm going to be looking potentially at calling to change that law,'' Pawlenty told the station.

The Governor could veto the legislation that would provide for this (whomever the governor is by that point). Get on the horn.

Posted by Mitch at December 6, 2002 11:21 AM