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Originally Posted by pnac
How did all these businesses operate before the government intrusion into everything, pre-information age? Your answer is probably going be "not very efficiently", but were we better off before all this "efficiency"?...
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No, my answer is probably just as well.
A big push for the HIPAA regulations came from consumer and public interest groups who were concerned about what they thought was a lack of privacy. Fact is that there were many privacy laws at the state level before HIPAA, and medical records were, as a matter of accepted ethics and law, confidential.
HIPAA probably didn't material improve matters, only formalized them at great expense. But people were frightened, and so we got HIPAA.
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Originally Posted by pnac
...We certainly had more privacy, medical costs were affordable and "death by doctor" wasn't any worse than now, probably lower....
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One reason that we perceive that in the good old days we had more privacy and medical costs were lower is that there was less medicine. In the last fifty years,there has been an exponential growth in available treatments, drugs, diagnostic services and medical technology generally. All this technology is expensive, and its use is largely funded by the third party payors which now pay for the vast bulk of medical care.
"Death by doctor" is largely a red herring. Doctors treat sick people. Sick people either get well of die. But it's more popular to blame a bad medical outcome on a mistake by a doctor than on the natural course of the medical problem. Sure, people, including doctors, make mistakes; and there are legal mechanism to deal with those. But a lot of the time the very best any doctor can do won't be good enough.
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Originally Posted by pnac
...the system stinks.
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You're welcome to try to fix it. Perhaps that would be a new career for you.