We haven’t talked about the Iron Law for a while so here’s an example of its action on steroids. This story is about Britain’s National Health Service and their contemplated betrayal of their patients’ privacy. I’m an American so I see this through American eyes but I can’t imagine that my British cousins see it much differently.
Here in the U.S., the doctor/patient relationship is sacrosanct and can’t be pierced—except under extraordinary, very narrow conditions—even by the courts. It is, in fact, a crime to divulge medical information (see the HIPPA act). The NHS, on the other hand, has a sordid history of trying to grab patient data and sell it to third parties including, incredibly, Google.
In their latest attempted grab, the NHS has directed the Kingdom’s GPs to provide all their patients’ data to the service so that it can be made available to third parties for research purposes. Although the service has downplayed the significance of the actions, many GPs are alarmed and have vowed to refuse to comply. Patients can opt out (until June 23) but the program has received little attention and most are unaware of it. The Labour Party has called for a delay until patients can be informed.
It’s classic iron law: if the data is collected, it will be abused. In this case it’s worse. The data had to be collected to provide good health care to the people providing it. It makes it even worse that others would like to grab and sell it.
The U.S. and Britain have very different healthcare systems and neither side can understand the other’s insistence on their system’s superiority but I’m pretty sure we can all agree that selling patient data—whatever the reason—is wrong. It’s not that the NHS is malevolent; they’re pursuing a noble goal but they’re pursuing it with other people’s property. If they want the data, the least they can do is ask.