Sjoerd wrote:
Universal health care has nothing to do with government officials have
access to medical records. You need to study these things a bit more before
making absurd claims.

Well technically, since health care workers are employed by the government,
then it is true that government employees have access to your records :-)

The thing is that governments have very strick privacy laws. And in most
civilised nations, there are also strong nationwide privacy laws in effect.

The problem is when you have a country that lacks such strick privacy laws and
where government agencies share data at will and are allowed to provide data
to private enterprise which have no legal obligation to protect data, then
there is leakage.

In the USA, you have no idea to whom your HMO is sharing your data with. But
in Canada, you know that your provincial government is the sole body with
access to the data and that it enforces strict privacy laws. Furthermore,
because health care is universal, a government doesn't care if you are
terminally ill or in excellent shape, whereas in the USA, the HMOs really do
care because they would rather not insure the terminall ill as a new customer.

And again, it is your own government that knows about you.

Now, when you look at fingerprints or other very personal identification, it
will be a foreign government (USA) with no defined privacy laws that will hold
your personal information and not only have you no idea what will happen to
it, but also no legal right over their holding your information. Will you be
able to verify that they have destroyed your prints after X years ? Will you
be able to verify that they have not passed your prints to someone else ?
(think access to information). Because one is not a citizen of the USA, one
will have very little rights to access personal information about yourself
held by the USA.