The real problem here is that your health care data is scattered across many processing and medical records systems from all the insurers and care givers that you have ever been involved with. This results in doctors not having the needed information, costly redundant care, misdiagnoses, etc. Couple that with the growing trend to have people/patients manage their health care costs, and it becomes clear that solutions like Microsoft's and Google's are necessary and the potential benefit outweighs the privacy risk (trust me: no one cares about your anal fissures) This is far less of a problem in more centralized models where a longitudinal view of a patient is much more readily available (kind of like how the IRS has your tax history).