Bill Nelson: “I thank Senators for letting me make this case. When I first came here, I became concerned that back in 1999 we allowed…”

“I thank Senators for letting me make this case. When I first came here, I became concerned that back in 1999 we allowed banks and insurance companies to merge, but we didn't protect individual's privacy. It would shock people to know that if you go have a physical exam in order to get a life insurance policy and if that life insurance company is acquired by a bank, that the access to those individually identifiable medical records is unlimited, without your personal consent, to anywhere within that bank holding company. You might also be interested to know that recently we had the issuance of rules by the Bush administration on medical record privacy, but there was a huge omission in that pharmaceutical companies could go to drugstore chains, pay the drugstore chain for the names and ability to communicate to individual people who had prescriptions, and then that pharmaceutical chain could contact that individual patient, asking them, soliciting them to change their medication to a different kind of medication, one that would be within the generic equivalent or a different brand name than the one that the physician had prescribed for them. That is an invasion of personal privacy. Yet it is allowed under the rules of the new administration.”