We’ve covered the controversial new medical survey for employees of Penn State here and here. Now Dr. Susan Berry of Breitbart reports that some employees of the school have started a petition.

Penn State Employees Protest Wellness Mandate over Privacy Concerns

Employees of Pennsylvania State University are protesting a new wellness effort that requires them to provide detailed health information or pay penalties that can add up to $1,200 per year.

An online petition against the program that was initiated by Penn State art-history professor Brian Curran now has over 2,000 signatures.

The petition states:

Penn’s State’s new Health Care policies, which have been rolled out quietly in the middle of the summer, include an excessively invasive “Take Care of Your Health” plan that forces employees, by imposing a massive, $1200 a year surcharge, to submit to poorly and unprofessionally mass-organized blood tests and “biometric screenings.” Included in this mandate is an additional mandate, requiring all employees and their spouses/SSDPs, to fill out an incredibly invasive “Wellness Profile” that, if taken, immediately shares ALL of the person’s private medical information with WebMD, a third-party agency with a far from comforting record in the area of privacy.

The petition states that, soon after the initiative was launched, two new surcharges were announced:

One directed at employees who self-identify as smokers, the other to employees with spouses covered by the plan who are presently eligible for coverage by their own employer. Each and every one of these policies-raises serious questions related to patient privacy and medical ethics. But perhaps most importantly, their punitive character raises fundamental concerns regarding the relationship between Penn State as an employer and its employees, who might have expected better after enduring the challenges of the last two years. In light of these concerns, not to mention the almost complete lack of appropriate consultation with representative bodies across the university, we ask, indeed, we demand, that implementation be IMMEDIATELY stopped, or at the very least delayed, so that further consultation with the employees and their representatives can begin.