Quick hits

Medpundit always has good stuff. I'm ripping her off for two things today, which don't really have much in common except that they might be ripe for political exploitation.

1. Does sitting with grandchildren cause heart disease? Hmm, can you think of any service industry that might plug this one?

2. Hazards of outsourcing medical records

A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients' confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients' records attached.

....She wrote: "Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed, so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet."

You can pass US laws until doomsday and not have a chance of controlling this. It's not as if US citizens can't do it too, but they're easier to track and catch at least.