HIPPA Tax

As usual I spent I spent part of the night waiting on the OR for yet another urgent case that would not be urgent if the patient went to see their primary care doc earlier. Well, that is if they could. They had Medicaid which is worse than having no insurance as no doc can afford to take it but that is for another post. Anyway, I was looking at their paper chart. Yes, even though we are on electronic medical records, there is still a paper chart. Guess what it is filled with? HIPPA forms. Over 22 pages of them. Some are the faxes that we have to send to get electronic records, others are all the medical information waiver forms. A lot of trees died for HIPPA. This got me to wonder. When the government passed HIPPA did they have a CBA estimate that said, hey this is going to cost the economy billions, and this cost is going to be taken away from taking care of patients? Lets see, we have all the manhours of staffing that it takes to make sure all of the paperwork for HIPPA is done. We have the HIPPA compliance consultants, we have all the increased costs of the EMRs to make them HIPPA compliant. There is all of the paper and the extra faxs. Then there is the government HIPPA auditors, not to mention the increased liability for a HIPPA breach. I'll bet it is in the billions.

I started to think about how much JACHO costs and how all that money could be used to actually take care of patients, but I stopped myself because it is not good to go into surgery p****ooo****!