Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Should Medical Privacy Laws Hamper Murder Investigations?

Is this a real Death of Common Sense?

By Linda Gorman

A valuable posting at Overlawyered.com points out that HIPAA and state privacy laws may have unintended consequences. One is preventing police from having speedy access to medical records when a patient is a prime suspect in a murder. See Privacy Law and Criminal Investigations, Cont’d.

Kathryn Faughey, a therapist in New York City, was hacked to death by an assailant wielding a meat cleaver. The police cited medical privacy law as a barrier to the investigation. According to the New York Times, the parents of the man now in custody for the murder “tried our best to keep him in the facility that he was hospitalized in over the many, many years of his illness,” he [the suspect’s father] said, standing outside his father’s home. “But they kept on releasing him, after we told them what had been going on.”

Further evidence, in case any is needed, that health care regulation needs serious overhaul, and that government control often brings, as Philip K. Howard has so eloquently pointed out, the death of common sense.