According to an article by James Thurman published in Christian Science Monitor, there is a debate raging in the United States over whether or not each American should be issued a medical identification number. The ultimate goal of issuing Americans with a national medical identification number would be to create a single national repository for all medical information that could be accessed by any health care professional. The database would provide historical as well as up to the minute information about every American citizen's medical condition. One advantage of this concept involves cost savings. Keeping all medical files in a single searchable electronic database would make information storage and retrieval faster, more efficient and less expensive. One of the primary reasons that many people oppose the idea of a national registry involves concerns over privacy rights and the data security of the database.
Opponents of the idea of a national health care information database suggest that the potential for abuse is greater with a centralized database because under the current system medical records are widely disbursed meaning that unauthorized access must be done one location at a time. According to critics, a centralized medical database would become a magnet for computer hackers, as well as individual reading the information for some form of prurient pleasure and companies interested in mining the information for profit (Thurman 3). No matter what thd rationale or jtstification, medical data needs to remain confidential. Medical information is private and personal, and therefore access to it should be restricted. If the government fails to act to take stringent measure to safeguard medical information, the potential for abuse is high.
According to Mark Sanchez writing for Grand Rapids Business Journal, medical information needs to remain confidential because the data is like a fingerprint. There is
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