Hi, one of the PicnicHealth founders here. It's great that you were motivated enough to upload your data to Google Health! Unfortunately for Google Health, most people weren't as motivated as you. We believe that Personal Health Records haven't yet been successful because they require users to manually upload their data, and most people just aren't willing to do this. That's one of the reasons why we take care of collecting and organizing records for our users.
About fees, you're right: one of our users would have had to pay over $700 in fees if he had tried to get the records from just one of his hospitalizations on his own! We have relationships set up so that we avoid fees almost 100% of the time, and when we can't avoid a fee we cover that ourselves. Our job is also to sort through the mess and pull out the salient information so that you don't have to.