Responding to msg by Mike Markley: What about being denied a job because you have been treated for some disease? How about being denied a loan because your medical history has a profile that indicates that your life expectancy is shorter than the duration of the loan? It seems that the potential for abuse is so great that we should not allow such cross referencing. ................................................................. ..... Hey, Mike, just remember in the real world no one is required to be kind. If some hospital or company makes a decision to deny service for whatever reason they justify to themselves, it's their call as long as they are not owned by the State. They would likely make the same decisions upon receiving any information which represented a potential loss of revenue, whether that information came from special history files or from a client's personal admission. Even though having information about oneself passed around among agencies is odious to contemplate, what a private company decides to do as a consequence of their information is not really 'abuse'. (How they get that information in the first place, however, could be.) Blanc