Save the Land

In the course of writing this blog, I read a lot of stuff from a lot of sources. Most of it is pretty dull stuff, but occasionally something pops out at me, like this from an otherwise routine piece on secondary heath information markets from CosumerAffairs.com:

Sales of medical data could also figure into new "consumer-driven health care" products such as Health Savings Accounts (HSA's), as at least one company has developed "medical credit scores" designed to parse the risk of borrowers looking for price comparisons on potential accounts.

The whole HSA thing has never seemed very practical to me, as it would only help those who were in a position to need an additional tax break. As a replacement for insurance it would simply not work for most of us. But if someone opts in to a program like that, intended so far as I can tell to reward individual responsibility, how is it right that companies are already looking for ways to "redline" customers. That they would be using a loophole to use your own PHI against you is doubly wrong.