Privacy Reform

Re “Bush Team Drops Privacy Rule for Patients’ Records,” March 22: Campaign finance reform arrived too late to prevent the administration’s frontal assault on patients’ rights. As head of an organization that has worked hard and long to secure the privacy of patients’ medical records it is disconcerting to see the health-care industry able to work behind the scenes to effect this monumental intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship--the foundation of all health care. The rationalizations being offered to justify this affront declare, in essence, that it was necessary to destroy patients’ privacy in order to save it.

Richard P. Fox MD

President, American

Psychoanalytic Assn.,

Dana Point