Comment by bryant
5 days ago
> Why be so secretive? This is not a military mission. These missions cost a lot of taxpayer money (money well spend you may argue), but we deserve full transparency.
We deserve as much transparency as we can get on the science we as taxpayers paid for, not full de-anonymization of the bodily happenings of living crew. There's certainly valuable science here, but the crew member doesn't have to be outed for it.
> You don't get to go to space on other people's money and expect privacy.
I don't think this is a healthy mindset, and there's a heck of a slippery slope with this argument. Would we apply this to companies receiving federal grants too? Contractors? Universities? Schools? That's a lot of people who'll lose medical privacy for something probably unrelated to their job, and there'll be a much smaller applicant pool for the jobs themselves if applicants are aware that their own internal issues might be disclosed when the public clamors for it.
> We might want to learn from what went wrong here.
Agree, NASA certainly will, and new science and engineering will come of it that we benefit from. But that doesn't have to involve breaching medical privacy and ethics.
I remember watching a landing and the camera cut away when one of the returning astronauts got sick.
These are human beings and employees not Big Brother contestants.
The full on dystopian take would be to require anyone receiving welfare or other public funds to fully disclose all of their private details.
You want Medicaid? Tell everyone about your hemorrhoids first.
Does that include those working for a company that gets tax breaks?
The fun part is absolutely everyone is using stuff made with public funds at one point or another
Might actually be a net benefit and lead to de-stigmatizing human health conditions
You go first, then. Let’s see your full medical records without redaction if you think it’s a net benefit.
I think there's value in reducing stigma around health conditions, but forcing poor people to reveal their medical conditions to the world isn't it.
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Exposing STDs and mental conditions is part of what HIPAA’s for. Putting everyone in glass houses just creates a massive panopticon.
By forcing the poorest to disclose their personal health issues?