Who owns medical records? Technically, the records themselves are the property of the physicians and hospitals that compile them. But the law has long recognized that patients also have rights to those records. Most significantly, under HIPAA’s Privacy Rule, a provider must, upon request, give a patient a copy of her medical records. But, to […]

My health law students and I were discussing HIPAA’s Privacy Rule when we got to talking about the iCloud hack of the nude celebrity photos. Although publication of the photos was a grotesque invasion of the celebrities’ privacy, there’s been no big push for the federal government to pass a law requiring Apple to take […]

Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a letter that sets up a potential congressional battle over the future of the risk corridor program. Contrary to how it’s been covered in the press, however, the letter is good news for HHS. It also suggests that the administration has been quite canny in its approach to […]

There’s no getting around it. The Affordable Care Act contains some sloppy drafting, most conspicuously in the section governing the calculation of tax credits. For the most part, that sloppiness reflects the intrinsic difficulty of writing a bill to reform a massive, complex health-care system. Yet the ACA also bears the scars of a brutal […]

Two weeks ago, Medicare announced a proposed settlement in a long-running billing dispute with hospitals. The size of the settlement is staggering: if accepted, it could end up costing the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars. The settlement also signals deep problems in one of Medicare’s flagship programs for eliminating wasteful spending. At its […]