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Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not. Healthcare is already oppressively expensive in the US and now you want companies to be able to commercialize and exploit my private health information for profit? And they don’t even have to pay for it so they can sell me the cure they developed using information from my private health information?

America needs to be a radically different place for me to be okay with what you want.

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It would be interesting if all research and advances based on PHI were automatically public domain. Sort of like the GPL - any derivatives, treatment discoveries, etc. must also be open. There would probably be too many loopholes to cover effectively, but it's a thought.

Then there would be no research and advances. Nothing is free.

We have Government funding available for such purposes; a better connected and more open PHI system would reduce barriers and costs for these kinds of endeavors.

We would still need controlled trials, which would continue to work similarly to today. But those would be perhaps less expensive as a result, reducing research costs and turn around times.

So are you being paid to comment? It amazes me how many people are motivated without profit to insist that nobody is motivated by anything other than profit.

Obviously funding is needed: funding which already comes from government in many cases. It's just that now that research funding gets handed to execs who then use the data to make more money, and only have to use the data to help people if it happens to coincide with their business strategy. Having the data public just means that the people working on it are motivated more by helping people and less by acquiring data to leverage for profit, which is a feature not a bug.

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