Daily Archives: October 2, 2005

Your DNA or Else! (Feingold & Kohl are on this Senate Comittee)

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Declan McCullagh:

The Violence Against Women Act may be about to do violence to Americans’ right to privacy.
A U.S. Senate committee (Judiciary, which includes both Wisconsin Senators: Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl – contact them on this issue!) has adopted an amendment to the VAWA legislation that would add the DNA of anyone detained by the cops to a federal DNA database called “CODIS.”
Note that it doesn’t require that you’re convicted of a crime or even formally arrested on suspicion of committing one. Mere detention — might a routine traffic stop eventually qualify? — will be sufficient for CODISification. (Current law only authorizes blood or saliva swabs and entry into CODIS for people convicted of a crime.)

Senator Kohl is up for re-election in 2006. I think Kathleen Falk would make an excellent candidate!

Anthropologists Help Explain Consumer Behavior

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Instead of poking around tribal villages in Papua New Guinea or Amazonian rain forests, cultural anthropologists are invading suburbs and cities to find out how people use products while eating meals, working in the office, and even while driving. “We live in a culture where knowing your customers one by one as individuals is more important than ever before,” said Ross Goldstein, a researcher with the BRS Group. “Large mass demographic trends are no longer as predictive as they once were because the marketplace is too diversified.”

Healthia: Comparison Shopping, Online, for Health Insurance

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This looks like a useful idea. California only, for now.

At Healthia, we are tremendous believers in the consumer driven healthcare movement sweeping America. Our goal is to provide America’s first comparison shopping and research portal for consumer driven healthcare, enabling businesses and their employees to choose health plans and ancillary health benefits objectively and transparently.
At our beta launch today (2005-Aug-11), we serve the California market with a strong emphasis on HSA compatible plans. We also enable any user across the nation to compare over 50 leading HSA products.

David Cowan has a useful summary of the movement behind this: “Consumer Directed Healthcare” or CDH. Cowan also references this CDH study.