My Doctor's Office Asked me to Lie (2011)

Assuming this is a standard private practice, this office has several violations of 45 CFR §164.520(a)(b)(c), assuming that he was also not provided this privacy statement within 30 days with a reason for why it was not provided on the first visit.

This makes them liable for $50,000 in fines per failure to a max of $1.5 mm (this would be a clear cut case of reckless indifference.) The DHHS OCR is always looking for some head to serve on a platter to justify themselves as well.

His amendment to the form is damning evidence and that receptionist should be fired, there is no excuse for basic HIPAA noncompliance in 2011 (8 years after the fact).

Edit: What some people don't seem to understand is that signing the privacy practices notice (the form in question here) does not mean you agree to the terms and conditions outlined. You only sign that you have received them. Additionally, whether you sign the form or not it applies to you, and whatever that form states HIPAA clearly outlines what powers the covered entity (the doctor in this case) has over your information.

What's less pointless and far more upsetting is the practice of pharmacies instructing customers to sign/check the "I do not wish to have a consultation" area on forms when buying prescription medicine. That has happened to me at a number of pharmacies in NYC. When I ignore their instructions and start signing the area that requests a consultation they sternly tell me I'm signing in the wrong place. Then there's a big sigh when I say I actually want to talk to the pharmacist. Inexcusable and disgusting.

To get rid of this, I recommend the follows - a mandatory "minimum reading period" given for any document, that prevents it from being turned in, calculated from the average HS graduate reading speed.

Also, before any meetings regarding revisions of said document, everyone involved in revising the document must A: be present, and B: serially, read a copy of the document, invoking the reading penalty multiple times over.

Optionally, to avoid this process, the document can be totally scrapped and replaced with an entirely new document, provided the new document is limited to 1/10th the reading length.

This would greatly reduce the amount of stupid long documents, and I see no downside.

A year or two ago, I rented one of those storage units to put a bunch of stuff in (although really I should probably just get rid of it). The guy hands me a copy of a "rental agreement" to sign that's several pages long (printed on both sides) and says, "Just flip to the back page and sign there at the bottom."

Having never rented one of these units before, I was completely ignorant as to the "rules" or what might even be included in such an agreement so I really did want to read it (whereas most of us can probably guess 98% of what the standard HIPAA/Privacy Policy says).

When I get to the bottom of the front of the first page, I look up and the guy is clearly annoyed (despite the fact that he didn't appear to be doing anything important when I walked in -- he was on Facebook on his computer).

I apologized to him and explained, saying, "I'm sorry, I've never rented one of these before so I really don't know what's allowed and I want to make sure I don't do anything wrong." At the time I was genuinely curious as to what could or couldn't be stored in the unit. Could I keep some really old guns in there? Maybe I could park my motorcycle in it during the wintertime and free up some space in my garage?

I asked him if he had a FAX machine in his office and he said that he did. "How about if I take this with me so I can read it at home and then I'll sign the back page and FAX it to you?" I asked, thinking that he'd be happy that he didn't have to sit impatiently and watch me for the next 20 minutes as I finished reading the document.

"Okay, that'll work." I slid the document back over to him and asked him to write the FAX number on it. I gave him my credit card to cover the initial payment, he ran it and I walked out.

I actually did sit and read the whole document when I got home but I didn't really like that I was required to give them 90 days notice prior to terminating the agreement (30 days would be more reasonable, IMO). If I decided today that I was going to move everything out of the unit tomorrow, I'd still have to pay for the next three months (at $46 USD per month) even though I wasn't using it any longer.

I never signed the document and I never FAX'd it back. I'm sure the guy probably forgot all about it before I even made it home and I haven't been contacted by the company since -- regarding the document or anything else. Every month they charge my credit card $46 and life goes on.

I'll be moving everything out of there in a few weeks. When I do, I fully intend to walk into the office, hand them the key, and point out that I never signed the document and will fight any attempts to charge me the next three months worth of rent.

Like most people, I usually just blindly click through EULA's and sign whatever documents wherever somebody tells me to but in this case not doing so paid off. I certainly wouldn't have expected that I'd be required to give them 90 days notice before vacating the storage unit.

Seems a bit odd.

The basic idea is that the user wants something (in this case medical treatment, but it could also be music via iTunes) and that's all nice and well - BUT! - one last caveat, we need you to sign this thing here.

Now the ratio kicks in - if your desire for "the thing" is big enough, "the thing you need to sign" just needs to look both terribly unimportant ("yadda yadda, nobody reads this") but at the same time important enough to be understood as necessary ("oh everybody has legalese upfront these days, that's just the way things work, who cares"). Bonus points if the process you're going through happens very often to a lot of people ("everybody just clicks OK and chuckles about it").

Asking anybody to sign 3000 pages of legal statements without giving it too much thought is bonkers, but everybody just assumes "well, they probably can't do anything terrible, because our laws prevent that, right?". So we click through EULAs and sign agreements that are now just nuisances getting inbetween us and our desire for "the thing we want".

The people who make these agreements do them because they are required to have them, by law or circumstance (CYAs). Not having an agreement is not an option. The people who sign the agreements do that because they have already decided that they want "that thing" no matter what. Not having the thing is not an option.

What a profoundly weird situation. Through what I would guess were a couple of outlandish precedents, we now have established a custom that none of the involved parties cares about nor has anything to gain from, really. But we still do it.

It's like two sides playing soundwaves with opposite phases, cancelling eachother out. Everybody assumes that's ok, because it's quiet. But you could just as well simply stop playing the damn sounds.

I say very politely that I can't say that I have received the money until I actually have.

Usually the teller has this smile that means "here's another one of them". Sometimes they don't smile at all, and I had to really argue once or twice, but in the end they all accept my reasoning.

I once singed up for a gym membership that had terrible stipulation to the point it was offending. I plastered the entire contract with "no" and "not" additions. It still went through.

Who benefits here? Lawyers? Insurance companies?

It's like that fine print on TV commercials. No human can read it given the size and the duration on screen, but that company covered their ass by having it there.