And You Thought a Prescription Was Private

The New York Times ^ | 08 Aug 2009 | MILT FREUDENHEIM

[BGHater]

MORE than 10 years after she tried without success to have a baby, Marcy Campbell Krinsk is still receiving painful reminders in her mail. The ads and promotions started after she bought fertility drugs at a pharmacy in San Diego.

Marketers got hold of her name, and she found coupons and samples in her mail that shadowed the growth of an imaginary child — at first, for Pampers and baby formula, then for discounts on family photos, and all the way through the years to gifts suitable for an elementary school graduate.

“I had three different in vitro procedures,” said Ms. Krinsk, now 55, a former telecommunications executive who lives with her husband in San Diego. “To just go to the mailbox and get that stuff, time after time after time, it was just awful.”

Like many other people, Ms. Krinsk thought that her prescription information was private. But in fact, prescriptions, and all the information on them — including not only the name and dosage of the drug and the name and address of the doctor, but also the patient’s address and Social Security number — are a commodity bought and sold in a murky marketplace, often without the patients’ knowledge or permission.

That may change if some little-noted protections from the Obama administration are strictly enforced. The federal stimulus law enacted in February prohibits in most cases the sale of personal health information, with a few exceptions for research and public health measures like tracking flu epidemics. It also tightens rules for telling patients when hackers or health care workers have stolen their Social Security numbers or medical information, as happened to Britney Spears, Maria Shriver and Farrah Fawcett before she died in June.

[TennesseeGirl]

I’ve experienced this same thing. I have a certain medical condition and have received coupons and “informational brochures” via mail for meds treating this condition. Unbelievable. It’s bad enough some DMVs sell our database info, but I’m pretty sure Express Scripts does too. The information is NOT coming from my doctor’s office. The pharmacy I use is a “mom & pop” not a chain. The only other folks that would have name, address, age, and prescription info would be our health and pharmacy insurers.

[Buckeye McFrog]

meanwhile if you go to your local CVS to pick up a script, they can’t page you over the intercom when it’s ready and they clamp down a big metal plate over the other names on the signout sheet, all due to HIPAA

[Still Thinking]

Well, I guess that’s what you get when legislators imagine they have the right to regulate what drugs you can and cannot ingest. If there were no prescription laws, you wouldn’t have to tell the pharmacy who you were.