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.
Most all of them.
From the article: "The chains are CVS, Walgreens, Cigna, Optum Rx, Walmart, Kroger, Rite Aid and Amazon. CVS, Kroger and Rite Aid, which have a total of about 11,000 locations nationwide, don’t require store staff to run the requests past company lawyers before complying.
Only Amazon notifies customers that it received a subpoena or warrant for their prescription data."
You know it’s bad when Amazon is the good guy in this situation.