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.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      It’s the top 8 chains. I didn’t even know there were that many and it’s got to be most of the pharmacies in the country. You can’t boycott practically a whole industry.

      The only realistic solution is changing laws.

      • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        10 months ago

        What about small mom/pop pharmacies? I know its a bit different in the US sometimes with pharms being “in network” but I don’t see the surveillance apparatus being too crazy about allowing that to happen

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          If there was a boycott big enough to matter, those pharmacies wouldn’t have anywhere near the capacity to handle all the new patients they’d need to serve.

    • TardisBeaker@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      10 months ago

      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."