It is a sad reality that many federal laws result in unintended consequences for the public which must abide by them. Such has been the fate of the much touted Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), a law so cumbersome it took the Department of Health and Human Services almost seven years to figure out how to implement it.

The most significant unintended results of HIPPA have occurred in the area of medical privacy. HIPPA made it a crime for a physician, hospital or anyone else knowingly to give out personal information about a patient. It was originally intended to be a small part of the Act, just a few hundred words inserted into the text. Unfortunately, the subject of privacy ended up as nearly fifty confusing pages, which have been widely quoted and just as widely misinterpreted.

In many instances, serious over-enforcement of HIPPA has been the result. As Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) stated on the subject in 2003:

"A kernel of congressional intent has grown into a towering tree of regulatory complexity."

Erring on the side of caution, hospitals have refused to share patient records with law-enforcement agencies and even family members though this was clearly not the intent of the law. And there is worse fallout: Even allowing for the usual miscalculations and trouble implementing the laws it passes, Congress did not adequately address the serious conflicts we will soon see between 21st Century technologies and medical privacy. So once again Congress will need to return to the drawing board and "fix" a problem it has helped create through negligence.

And what is the biggest threat to patient privacy today? It is in the form of a tiny microchip that can be embedded in a band, a card or in the arm of a human being. Lest you think this is the stuff of science fiction or a bad movie script, the Federal Drug Agency (FDA) approved an imbedded microchip and chip "reader" made by a company called VeriChip in 2004 and the system is already in use in select hospitals throughout the US.

The chip system allows an employee to scan the arm of a patient with a microchip embedded in a hospital band or under his skin and view a unique patient number. The number is then placed into a database, enabling an instant reading of the patient's medical history and any other pertinent data. Continued...