Walter Olson with his take:
Under HIPAA, it would have been unlawful for the psychiatric hospital that treated student Cho Seung-Hui, who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech university this week, to compare notes on his therapeutic progress, or lack thereof, with his counselors or dean. So effectively did the various privacy laws bottle up information that even a Virginia Tech official tasked with the monitoring of problem students is said to have known little or nothing about Cho’s lurid history of psychotic symptoms until after the fact.Under HIPAA’s terms, doctors and other covered persons who improperly release information about identifiable persons’ health care are subject to fines and even prison terms of up to ten years. That a disclosure is well-meaning rather than malicious is no defence: disclosures to patients’ own parents or roommates, as well as disclosures to other medical or custodial institutions, can very much trigger liability; and the exact scope of what is deemed proper disclosure is by no means precisely defined.
Related posts:
- Virginia Tech: When should patients’ rights be sacrificed?
- HIPAA madness
- Useless HIPAA
- West Virginia malpractice reforms: "Worked like a charm"
- Virginia Tech: A call for gun control?
- The Virginia Tech massacre
- Virginia Tech aftermath: Asian-American backlash
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Apparently British journalists are no more devoted to accuracy than American ones. He probably found all this in print or on the internet somewhere. But much of it is dead wrong.
Walter Olson is 100% dead on accurate about the destructive nature of HIPAA.
I agree that HIPAA is destructive, and wrote the feds from the late 90’s as the rules were being formulated to give my opinion on the matter. What he says the law does is plain wrong however. You can’t be 100% right if your facts are wrong.
HIPAA is destructive in that it even exists and in what it does, and also in the industry’s ramshackle application due to widespread ignorance and misinformation about what the rule says.
Kevin, does it bother you that I read a particularly inflammatory post that mirrors your agenda and my instant reaction is that it’s factually inaccurate. Just as in most cases, that is true again. It’s a variation of an old joke. How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving.
I didn’t know that starting a fire in your dorm room was protected by HIPAA.
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