Off Limits: Your Health, Your Job, Your Privacy

"I think they wanted me to hire 24-year-olds who are celibate with their tubes tied," says a human resources manager at Clifton Steel. She's referring to the increasingly picky insurance companies who want to insure only low health risk employees. Thanks to huge databases such as MIB (Medical Information Bureau) that are filled with valid (and invalid) medical and personal data, both insurance companies and employers now have instant access to all kinds of information, much of it crossing over into what many of us would consider the private realm. Off Limits is an alarming program that chronicles examples of current abuse and raises the specter of a pretty frightening future. With batches of records in the millions being sold back and forth between databases charting one's work, financial, and medical histories, composite profiles are being compiled which often tell a tale far different from the truth. Reporter Scott Simon visits a few people who found out what happens when companies decide to evaluate employees by factors other than job performance. One woman refused to fill out a "standard" company medical form which required information about discussions between patient and doctor. She was subsequently fired; she later took the company to court and lost. Another woman felt she was under pressure to take a genetic screening test, since her father had died of Huntington's (later it was discovered that her father actually died of Alzheimer's). As one interviewee points out, we are no longer a "frontier nation." In the old days, you could pick up roots, head west and start anew with a clean slate. Today, the slate is pretty full and in a wired world, your personal history is only a few keystrokes away. And it's not just small, tucked-away companies that are putting pressure on employees. At Ted Turner's TBS, for instance, they didn't hire smokers (even if the person only smoked at home). Recently, the court ruled "smoke-free" hiring to be discriminatory, but the incident raises obvious questions. What about alcohol? Or elevated cholesterol? Or people who eat red meat? Fit folk for health-oriented companies is a very slippery slope kind of issue, and one we should start to think about now, before it's too late. Off Limits is an excellent discussion starter about the eroding concept of privacy in the age of high tech. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)