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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (96788)	1/25/2005 10:15:46 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793711

So let me get this straight -- at your hospital, race is so important that if the patient doesn't put his/her race down on the intake sheet, the intake personnel guess at his/her race? Do you see the logical disconnect here? It's so important that they guess what it is. Sounds pretty reckless to me. Unless what's really going on has nothing to do with medicine, but is just mindless record keeping. Virginia until just a year or two ago required race on statistical forms like marriage records and divorce records, but we finally got with the 21st century and they don't require that anymore. I was relieved, I always felt like an idiot asking people what race they were and what race their soon-to-be-ex-spouse was. But I never guessed!

To: DMaA who wrote (96788)	1/26/2005 8:21:53 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793711

The reason I asked about your basis is that I thought that eyeballing was illegal. My basis for that is fuzzy. I remember the early days of recording race. I was involved in it at the time. At first employers were required to report racial data on employees but were prohibited from recording it. Hard to pull a report off the employee data base when there is no data element for race. Then they changed the law and people were eyeballed and recorded. Then they changed the law so that people had the right to specify their race. The most recent issue was with the last census where people were allowed to choose more than one race. There have been a lot of changes over time. I am fuzzy now on the details of the laws I dealt with so I am questioning my recollection of the scope of the laws in light of your assertions. I can't remember for sure whether their scope was beyond employment data. Perhaps they didn't include patient records. If it is not illegal, though, to eyeball patients getting medical tests then I think it should be. Or at least unethical. Seems dangerous to me. It's certainly more important that an individual have control of that data for medical purposes than for census purposes.