It's been nearly 60 years since George Orwell wrote his prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which coined the idiomatic term Big Brother as a euphemistic way of describing an invasion of our privacy. Obviously, the year 1984 has come and gone, but unfortunately Big Brother and the tacit implications of Orwell's 1984 are still with us in 2008. This is especially true for health care in the United States.

Despite our government's effort to try to keep the Big Brother syndrome in check with the passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996, data mining has become pervasive in our society, especially in health care.More »