Workers Fear Medical Blacklist

Ernest Trent was making $11 an hour four years ago as a roustabout on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig. An accident at sea left him 35 percent disabled, and he now earns $5 an hour at a Burger King in Shreveport, La.

The 39-year-old father of nine says he applied to nearly 200 companies for jobs in sales and maintenance at his old salary range, ``but they all said my qualifications didn't meet their needs.''

Trent contends he was blacklisted by the oil industry because he filed a lawsuit and collected worker's compensation benefits. That brought him to the attention of Employer's Information Service, a data bank that gathers worker's compensation records and sells them to companies for use as a pre-employment screening tool.

Contrary to the common belief that medical records are confidential, the health histories of millions of people are open to employers and insurance companies.

Medical records are collected for two basic purposes - to screen job candidates and to evaluate applicants for life, health and disability insurance.

Medical Information Bureau Inc. of Westwood, Mass., maintains health reports gathered from physicians and hospitals on 15 million people who have applied for individual insurance coverage. Its 750 client companies write 99 percent of individual life coverage in the United States and about 85 percent of individual health and disability policies.

MIB does not list medical reports of workers enrolled in group-health policies or those insured by Blue Cross or Blue Shield. But group policies are usually sponsored by employers, and a survey of Fortune 500 companies by the University of Illinois showed that 50 percent used medical records of their employees for employment-related decisions.

Companies receive employee medical information from several sources. Job application forms may have medical-history questions. Some companies require job applicants to take physical exams administered by company doctors.

Companies may also look at their employees' health insurance claims, said David Linowes, former chairman of the U.S. Privacy Protection Commission and author of a 1989 book, ``Privacy in America.''

``These are in effect secret lists,'' he says of the data banks.

Linowes concedes that insurance companies, ``which are in the business of betting on a person's life,'' must know about the health of applicants.

Harvey Berman, a spokesman for Aetna Life and Casualty Co., says the company treats policy-holders' medical histories as confidential and limits their use to evaluating the risk of insurance applicants. But he notes that client companies that process their own employees' claims are free under law to inspect these claims.

Data merchants say they advise clients not to use medical or workers' comp reports as the sole basis for employment or insurance decisions. The records are merely a flag that suggests further investigation is needed, says MIB President Neil Day.

But tell that to Edgar Burgin of Ashfield, Mass., who believes he was blacklisted for disability coverage after being rejected by one company. An architect and father of two, he was concerned that any damage to his hands or eyes would prevent him from earning a living.

A year before applying, however, doctors operating on Burgin for a ruptured appendix found a small tumor. He had further surgery to remove surrounding tissue because of possible malignancy.

``Everything was clean and that was that - until I applied for disability insurance,'' Burgin says.

Burgin believes the record of his surgery is on file at MIB and available to insurance companies.

``My agent is searching for a company that will pick me up, but he can't find one,'' he says.