Loren Steffy, the business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, has written (rather bravely) about his employer's plan to have Chron employees give blood--not for any charitable purpose, but to keep health care costs down:
Giving blood to stave off higher premiums is just one more indignity in the modern workplace. We can't get a job without handing over a cup of our urine to a prospective employer. Now, as my colleague Brett Brune reported earlier this week, at least one local employer is using urine to test for nicotine usage, too. Our pee, it seems, is mightier than our word.
Under the guise of "wellness," a little more of our private identity falls away, consumed by an ever more intrusive public domain. It may make us healthier, but we pay the price as surely as if we'd posted our Social Security number on the front door.
In an age where you can't count on a bank or a shoe store to keep your credit card information secure, how are we supposed to feel confident that an insurance company won't release medical data? Or lose it? Or sell it? Or simply use it against us?
The Chron (which is owned by Hearst, a corporation for which I once worked) claims that this sort of pre-screening can detect early symptoms of major medical problems (and, not so incidentally, keep costs down), but I have to agree with Loren Steffy: it seems a major invasion of privacy.
Back when I worked for Hearst, I swore I'd never pee in a cup for any potential employer, but that idealism seems quaint these days--there are people in the workforce today who have probably never not peed in a cup as a matter of course in employment, even for a temporary McJob. Still, I have to agree with Steffy's conclusion:
Despite all of this, I am among the lucky ones. As I wrestle with the idea of turning over blood samples to fend off a premium hike, millions of others don't even have the option....
It's a reminder that the health care system in this, the most prosperous country on Earth, has become a bureaucratic patchwork that Dr. Frankenstein would envy.
So we give our blood, surrender our urine and fill out questionnaires in a vain attempt to deny the unavoidable truth: The system is failing us all.
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