Basically, right now it is very tough for you to get a copy of even your own medical history. It is all paper based, there are a myriad of laws that restrict its dissemination. In the 21st century, a lot of doctors, dentists, and other medical professionals still use paper.
What if your doctor's office burns to the ground? Of course, it would all be lost. This is why we need electronic records; the only place you are likely to find those right now are the VA hospitals, which incidentally provide some of the best care in the country.
Anyway, the benefits to this would be more openness in the medical community. Imagine how much quicker the Vioxx correlation with heart disease would have been found if everyone's records were in a big database. Very quickly, algorithms would see that many patients on Vioxx would dying of similar causes. This could be very helpful in seeing how safety plays out in the real world. It would also provide a lot of data for tracking how diseases spread, and also may help finding causation for other issues. For example, a cluster of cancer within a neighborhood, or within a county, possibly due to pollution.
I think the benefits far outweigh the risks, which is of course, a large reduction in privacy. Then again, it is easy enough to separate names from the data.
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