Some leading drug store chains turn over customers’ private health care information without a warrant.

The American legal system has a message for women concerned about their abortion rights: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your pharmacist is your friend.

Thanks to a gaping loophole in federal health care regulations, some of our leading drug store chains turn over customers’ most sensitive private health care information to law enforcement agencies, even without a warrant.

That’s the finding of a subcommittee headed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., which learned that all eight of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains have routinely turned over prescription records of thousands of Americans to law enforcement agencies or other government entities secretly without a warrant.

  • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    It’s the top 8 chains. I didn’t even know there were that many and it’s got to be most of the pharmacies in the country. You can’t boycott practically a whole industry.

    The only realistic solution is changing laws.

    • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      10 months ago

      What about small mom/pop pharmacies? I know its a bit different in the US sometimes with pharms being “in network” but I don’t see the surveillance apparatus being too crazy about allowing that to happen

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        If there was a boycott big enough to matter, those pharmacies wouldn’t have anywhere near the capacity to handle all the new patients they’d need to serve.