Not uncommon (Score 3)

This happened to me. Well, not me exactly, but to my parents. When my father went to work for a new company he received health insurance for the entire family like usual. This particular company, however, was using pooled insurance with several other companies, which means they would pool in a certain amount of money based on their profits and their percent usage of the pool.

Myself having hemophilia, my treatments in the form of synthetic factor are extremly expensive, costing in the hundreads of thousands of dollars PER MONTH. This is more than many conditions, including AIDs and most cancers. You can imagine this was a huge drain and was quite costly to the company.

The solution in the company's mind was termination, but it was obvious this would be asking for trouble. So, they took the route *most* travelled and pushed my father out. They would find things to complain about, fire all his staff and make him frantic -- they basically made it like hell. He eventually quit, with these retaining these rumors.

So, in a way, it's similar to genetic discrimination in the other case. So it isn't just a "look what happened to that laddy" article, and I take real offense to that considering this is what most companies do all the time. And don't think your personal records are safe because insurance-company communication is very frequent, especially if they are close knit as in this case. Do you have a company logo on your insurance card or is does your company have any association with your insurance provider (if covered by your employment plan)? If so, it would be trivial for any one sufficiently high enough in the company to get ahold of anything medically about you, probably down to the linens used in your last clinic checkup.