Data-Mining Ban Struck Down By US Supreme Court 176
smitty777 writes "The Supreme Court struck down in Sorrell vs IMS Health a Vermont law banning data mining which has been in place since 2007. The court ruled that the data on medications prescribed by doctors is protected by the First Amendment and can be used for marketing by the pharmaceutical companies. This follows similar declarations in Maine and New Hampshire."
Re:court made the right decision (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't your personal and private health care information, the patient stuff is lost in the aggregation, all they want is the prescribing doctor data.
They don't care about your health information, they want to know things like:
* Dr Phil is prescribing competing Product X 5 times as often as he prescribes our Product Y.
* Dr Bill is very well respected by other physicians and prescribes our Product Z a lot.
Sure, you mightn't like what they do marketing wise with that, but it has exactly nothing to do with your personal and private health care information.
Re:Long-term damage from the Bush Admin (Score:4, Informative)
Um, in what way is "corporatist" not a philosophy of "limited scope of the federal government?"
Corporations are creations of government by definition. They don't exist without government protection.
Here's a limited government position: governments should not be in the business of creating and protecting corporations. See, that was easy, wasn't it?