Privacy and Health Care

Well-known ethical, medical, legal, and philosophical thinkers debate the conflicting moral and legal demands for maintaining the privacy of health care records in an age of easy computer access to those records and growing pressure by insurance companies, public health agencies, and employers for personal health care data. Interdisciplinary and enlightening, Privacy and Health Care presents the latest moral and legal thinking for and against greater protection of the privacy of health care information, and advances this important issue to a new level of clarity and decision.Although a legal and moral right to privacy is generally recognized in society, there is no agreement regarding how these rights should apply to medical information. In Privacy and Health Care, leading ethical, medical, legal, and philosophical thinkers debate the conflicting moral and legal demands for maintaining the privacy of health care records in an age of easy computer access to those records and growing pressure by insurance companies, public health agencies, and employers for personal health care data. The essays by Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Margo Goldman, and Bill Allen & Ray Moseley favor restrictions being placed upon access to medical information, whereas the chapters by David Korn and Mark Meany argue for the opposing view. An introductory article by Charity Scott delineates the principal legal and ethical issues on the general topic of medical privacy.§Interdisciplinary and enlightening, Privacy and Health Care presents the latest moral and legal thinking for and against greater protection of the privacy of health care information, and advances this important issue to a new level of clarity and decision.