To the Editor.—
Dr Entmacher's recent apologia of the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) raises many good questions about the value and weakness of a centralized medical data center (233:1370,1975). I would like to try to respond to these questions from another point of view.
The point of view that I would like to assume would be that of those applicants for insurance policies who are not forgetful or fraudulent, but people of integrity who desire to avail themselves of the services of an insurance company and also believe that their medical records are a matter of privacy.
If the applicant knows that a record is being kept, and he wishes to review his own record, what assurance does he have that the record shown is the complete record? and how likely is it that the client can challenge an inaccurate record that was made by someone else (eg, physician, nurse)?
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