Want your drug store to share your prescription info with mass mailing companies?

Sounds like a bad idea, right? Not to state legislators, who are working on a bill that will do exactly that. Our own David Lazarus has the details:

Under legislation that quietly passed in the state Senate on May 29 and is making its way through the Assembly, drugstores would be free to share patients' prescription records with companies that specialize in bulk mailings.

Money would change hands along with people's personal data, but, as you'll see, it's not exactly clear who's paying whom.

Rationale for letting your local Sav-On or Rite Aid spew your private info is to help remind you to take your meds or get refills, but critics say it's really about money. And get ready for (all together now) privacy violations.

More on the issue in David's full column here.

--Veronique de Turenne

Photo: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[concerned citizen]

This is insane and absolutely braindead: what's wrong with our legislators? They spent money like water and got us into such debt they're stealing our local taxes like surplus gas taxes of $2 Billion that we desperately need for the promised purpose: Transportation. But the Assembly can't stop passing bills that impose new burdens on us and invade our privacy.

The public would get NO benefit from this at all -- the question is, how much did the Legislators who wrote this awful bill get paid by drug companies and their lobbyists?

Consumers MUST be asked if they want to participate in this -- I sure don't want my medication info, Date of Birth and address, given to ANYONE. I go out of my way to keep my personal data out of bank sharing plans using the "Opt Out" plan, and even then, I worry that there are too many loopholes.

Drug companies claiming the reason for this is to remind people to take their meds is a blatant lie: and insulting, A mass mailing isn't going to be the way to remind anyone to take their meds.

Our state Assembly is crazy to give away people's private info without asking their permission, then pretending along with the DA Cooley and State Attorney General Brown, that it's a "shock, shock, that ID fraud is going on."

[Robert Laughing]

And the twits keep RE-ELECTING the same vermin? aaaaaaamazing! See? NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FREAK LEFT and FREAK RIGHT. May we suggest, ALL NEW FACES in November?