HIPPA’s Hypocrites

Abstract

Over the last thirty years, the federal government and “mental health professionals”2 have created barriers to treatment for the seriously mentally ill. In the mid-1990s, all three branches of the federal government made decisions that resulted in privacy becoming the most complicated aspect of practicing medicine. While privacy protections were applied to medicine generally, the government further singled out “mental health treatment” and enshrined privacy as its paramount attribute. Tragically, patients became the casualties in this secrecy crusade, as continuity of care was harmed by the failure to share patient information. In the race to sanctify the newly declared, supremely important canon of privacy, good medical care and patient welfare were simply ignored. Nothing became as important to medicine as privacy.