Dr. Wes: “Why the heck do we even have HIPAA when insurers can play this game with our most private healthcare information?”
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- Andrew Speaker: Were HIPAA laws broken?
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HIPAA is such a fraud. I’m pregnant. At my doctor’s office they gave me a bunch of forms to fill out for “free stuff” from formula and diaper makers and parenting magazines.
I threw it all out.
I still started getting all that stuff in the mail. Hmmm. I investigated. My insurance company sold my name.
Do you think that this is the way Google is going to get around having to protect data to all the different international standards? Sign a private contract?
http://www.waittimes.blogspot.com
You poor suckers! HIPAA is worse than useless. It was a fraud all along. I have followed this, commented on the proposed rule, and tried to educate whoever would listen since the law authorizing the rule was passed.
It is not a privacy protection rule—it is a disclosure rule which permits disclosures which, while not federally prohibited, the medical industry dared not engage in before getting the blessing of HIPAA. Doctors were and remain ignorant about it’s provisions–which is no excuse. We were responsible to stay on top of the removal of our eons old ethical obligations to protect our patients privacy–an obligation which remains regardless of the law.
The public was guillible enough to belief that because it was called a privacy protection rule, that it did that–a sign of elective ignorance as well given the repeated history of the government giving bills name that reflect the exact opposite of their actual effect.
The next wave of suckers are all those folks building a personal health record on the web. They have neither common law/ethical protections of the doctor-patient relationship or the thin pseudoprotections of HIPAA. They have only the good faith and integrity of the corporation holding the data to rely on—and we have all seen how trustworthy MBA’s and their legal minions are!
We are living in an age of a complete collapse of medical privacy.
I can see it now, the rebound marketing pitch: “please take comfort in knowing that your entire medical record from us will be placed and will remain on paper. None of your record will be placed in an electronic format.”
From now on, a social security number and an ICD code, always linked, always searchable.
It already happens. I had some IT professionals refuse to let their records get digitized when our psych clinic went to EMR. Those out of the know didn’t care.
No Private Cause of Action-
While HIPAA protects the health information of individuals, it does not create a private cause of action for those aggrieved (65 FR 82566). State law, however, may provide other theories of liability.
You will also find, if your information is ever given away with out your permission, that there is no enforcement agency that has the jurisdiction to enforce violations of HIPPA.
So effectively there is no privacy protection law. Our government just wasted thousands of tax dollars writing and passing a law that will protect no one and be enforced by no one. And who can calculate the environmental impact of all those useless HIPPA forms that you have to sign every time you see a Dr only to have them take up space in a landfill somewhere.
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