A Comment on <em>Privacy and Accountability in Black-Box Medicine</em>

Human institutions and activities cannot avoid failures. Anxiety about them often provokes governments to try to prevent those failures. When that anxiety is vivid and urgent, government may do so without carefully asking whether regulation’s costs justify their benefits. Privacy and Accountability in Black Box Medicine admirably labors to bring discipline and rationality to thinking about an important development — the rise of “black-box medicine” — before it causes injuries regulation should have prevented and before it is impaired by improvident regulation.

That is, Privacy and Accountability weighs the costs against the benefits of various forms of regulation across the many kinds of black-box medicine.