McCain “Let’s put medical records online”. Bad idea.
I try not to talk politics, in fact I blame BOTH political parties for the issues our country currently faces. However, listening to the debates this evening I heard something from Sentator John McCain that irked me to no end, particularly given his general technological atavism. During this evening’s debates he stated “Let’s put medical records online” as a way to increase productivity. First off this may sound like a good idea, the problem however is that this data cannot be secured. The government as a proven record of lacking IT security infrastructure, they cannot even keep nuclear secrets safe at Los Alamos from meth addicts, trusting the government or any company to keep our medical records safe “online” is a very very bad idea, this is also something that we should have some choice about.
If you want to keep data safe, do not put it online. If you want to keep it really safe, do not put it on a computer. If you want to keep the data really really safe, do not write it down anywhere, and most of all don’t trust it to the government. I lost some respect for McCain tonight, he is not qualified to speak about technology and to make a comment like putting all medical records online is asinine. It is analogous to saying let’s put people’s social security numbers and religious preferences online. Even if the data is encrypted, password protected what have you, there is no reason for this data to be online, or stored in a database that can be mined by the government, or an attacker if the data is compromised. Imagine the street value of every American’s medical records.