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Why American Healthcare is So Expensive Part 4 – HIPAA and Healthcare Regulation
It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I didn’t know what that meant when I was younger, but one day in my second year of residency I found out.
We were told one that all our clinics would be cancelled on a friday the following week and we were would be required to go to a mandatory meeting to learn about new government regulations that would be impacting the way e delivered care. We all thought this would be boring and didn’t like it, but nonetheless we all gathered together in the auditorium.
In that meeting we were taught about a new law coming down the pike called HIPAA. Basically, this law was being put into place to fix a few perceived problems in healthcare. Some of these issues made a lot of sense, like creating national identifiers for physicians so that different insurers could identify providers across multiple policies. It also created a national coding system for insurance claims, and that made some sense.
And then the real shit began. They explained the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
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