After blood draws, BMI/WHM, questionnaires, Company Health Coaches (who can OVERRULE your own doctor), etc., your personal "coach" (RN), will meet with your to discuss your personal health plan! Stop smoking, recommend a gym (kickback?), and make up a meal plan and escort you GROCERY SHOPPING! To make sure your don't "cheat"????? If you are young woman, your coach will even advise you the optimum time to have your first child!!!!! In your 20s is the HEALTHIEST time to have a baby so if you want "health", get PREGNANT. As one young woman told her "health" coach, can you advise a dating service so I can find a HUSBAND so I can get married and pregnant before my 30th birthday?

This is not a JOKE. That Wellness Program did that where I used to work. Key word USED to work.

The corporations, who should only be involved in financial arrangements, are trying to impose themselves into the doctors' roles. It's galling.

I've heard of ridiculous corporate wellness programs before, but telling a woman she needs to be pregnant just takes the cake.

to go get fucked.

I never knew that

Do you think those cards are for?

I take it you lie to your doctor about your bad habits when you go in for appointments too, right?

Heaven forbid anyone try to keep you healthier in advance, rather than simply allowing you to get COPD and diabetes in peace, so that you can exercise your freedom to enjoy decades of insulin shots and emergency breathing treatments, as well as the excitement of ambulance rides out to the ER, never knowing if you're going to be DOA.

FREEDOM!

I'd favour making it an option, so that people so worried about 'freedom' can opt out, so they can die decades earlier, but 'free'.

I bow to your awesome intellect.

I can tell that you're as much of an intellectual giant as the other poster, so I shan't argue your diagnosis.

I'm with you.

at the link provided by the OP.

The one with lines from doctors saying that they're trying to find people who are likely to have serious problems so they can reach out and help them prevent such.

Day in and day out, our information is used by people who merely want to sell us products we don't need. Now we're going to be outraged because it might be used to give us advice on staying healthy?

Can I rent target lists for the Drug Giants to go after?

It's already available. The article is not anything about new data being collected, it's about hospitals buying the data from the people who are already collecting it.

Use a CVS 'extracare' card? A Kroger's card? Any of those little key fob cards? The data is being collected, and in most cases, when you signed up for the cards, you agreed to let them use that data certainly internally, but also with 'partners', or possibly even with anyone that wants to buy it.

Because they figured out that Mommy bought Jr.a donut last Sunday morning.

It's one thing for my doctor's office to call me and remind me to get that colonoscopy done. It's another for my insurance company to write me to remind me that I haven't been refilling a Rx that isn't needed any more or was changed.

if the quoted text above were talking about insurance companies, as opposed to 'doctors' and 'hospital chains'.

The one I would insist driving past to a better one where I know some staff and is still in my network?

The point is that I might have some preferences on who gets my profile and which organization has no business seeing my personal data and making money off it.

any store 'discount' cards that let you get money off in exchange for allowing them to collect and sell your data. I know I use such, and generally save something like 25% on my grocery runs every time for using that card.

And, of course, you use programs to let you use the web anonymously, that block all of the google-analytics code snippets, and the tracking done on any webpage with a facebook or twitter button.

data collected on me. I'm not 100% successful.

But I'd rather my health data be kept as private as possible. It may not be a big deal to you. But for some of us who have been personally violated, this kind of intrusion regarding our bodies is painful.

This kind of data collection and selling is violating people's personal boundaries.

If you want to opt-out of ANY data collection by anyone, that should be your right.

There should be something along the lines of the national 'do not call' list, and serious penalties for those who violate such, with the money going to the injured party. (Ie, if someone does collect and hand out your data, they should have to pay YOU some serious amount of money, certainly far more than they themselves might have gotten by doing so.)

My sister has a discount card with a pharmacy. She buys her over the counter stuff, I buy box wine when I don't want to drive across town(to avoid Walmart) and we both buy stuff for our elderly mother. What a mash up of products. LOL Just type in the phone number and they don't ask for ID.

This is an intrusive violation of privacy. I'd tell my doctor he can fuck off if they did this to me.

The problem of course comes in when insurance companies start foisting this kind of intervention on both you and your doctor, then increasing premiums when you fail to comply. Then you have little choice. And anybody who doesn't think this is where it winds up is clueless about recent history.