This is not something I worry about. If someone won't hire you because of a medical condition, you didn't want to work for them anyway. Better to find that out

This is not something I worry about. If someone won't hire you because of a medical condition, you didn't want to work for them anyway. Better to find that out before you're entrenched. Maybe, maybe not. The machinations of hiring are not necessarily representative of the rest of the work environment. And if a person with a politically unpopular medical condition gets turned down from a job, they won't know the reason. They're unlikely to say "Thank goodness I didn't get hired." -- more likely: "I wonder if my condition had any influence on the decision." These people would be much happier with greater confidentiality. Why keep records of things you don't want people to know about? In case they are medically relevant. It's not clear from the Google summary whether the patient has editorial control over the contents of their medical records, but it's not hard to imagine a service where they do not -- no doctor wants a patient to be able to remove notes on drug dependency issues from their file. Lists of operations and medications are medically relevant and potentially embarrassing; even something as simple as a list of vaccinations can tell you where a person grew up, which could be a politically sensitive issue.