I wanted your thoughts on something: my country has just started this thing called My Health Record;it is a mandatory digital storage of health records. You have to manually opt out. Personally, i can see how it would be useful for an emergency situation, but i'm not comfortable how it is stored digitally & government sanctioned (they don't have the best track record on keeping personal info private, do they?) But it also feels like another way to control the population and it makes me feel :S
Apparently this type of thing is being implemented more and more, they are beginning to make databases of people with autism in Europe and justifying it in a similar way, but it's obviously horrifying.
Having everything in a simple database would be so nice because when you are disabled you spend 90% of your time filling out paperwork and that paperwork has to be done before anyone will even consider speaking to you. As someone who has an extensive medical history, it's impossible for me to put everything down on a form so if I could just go into a doctor's office and give my name and social that would make my life a lot easier.
The risk, though, doesn't make the convenience worth it. If society had evolved much since the Holocaust this may be something we could use but as is becoming evident to everyone, nothing's changed.
People know about things like gas chambers but most people believe they appeared out of a vacuum when in reality they were originally made for the disabled population. What ended in those horrific pictures we see in history books started with a simple notation of "T4" on disabled people's medical records to indicate that they should be put to death with the poison Tiergartenstraße 4.
It was insidious but it was also something the country supported because of the usual propaganda that they were putting us out of our misery and that we would no longer be a financial burden. It's easy to see how something like that can happen right now, anywhere. Until the greater population has an education about disability and disabled history it's too risky.
