Why your health secrets may no longer be safe with your GP

Last Sunday’s Observer column about the NHS plan to create a national database of health records.

Those planning this healthcare data-grab are clearly hoping that citizen inertia will enable them to achieve their aim, which is to make our most intimate personal details available for data-mining by “approved researchers”. If they succeed, then, starting in March, the medical data of everyone who has not opted out will be uploaded to the repository controlled by the NHS information centre. And for the first time the medical history of the entire nation will have been stored in one place.

What’s wrong with this?

How long have you got?

The paranoia of the One Per Cent

Wow! This Letter to the Editor appeared in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, which helpfully points out in a footnote that the correspondent is one of the founders of Silicon Valley’s most successful Venture Capital firm. He’s the Perkins in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Tom Perkins

San Francisco

LATER: This tweet from KPCB

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