I get what you are saying, but I'm not sure I agree.

If I buy a new car and it (by design) has a speedometer that sometimes shows the wrong speed or sometimes makes the lights malfunction and I get traffic tickets, do I have no right to be upset with the car manufacturer simply because I routinely speed and roll stop signs?

Honestly, I think HIPAA may have been a net negative to the medical industry and has probably prevented the basic sharing between medical practices and related services that it was supposed to more readily allow. The lawyers have benefited a lot, and the abstract details insurance companies have gathered, but refuse to disclose based on HIPAA grounds to their own customers about themselves and medical practitioners treating those same people is often ridiculous at best.

HIPAA mandates that the people have access to their own PHI held by covered entities, a mandate which did not exist before HIPAA, so it did the opposite of creating additional barriers to patients getting access to their own data.

Patients are denied access to their own records in the name of HIPAA. During a recent medical crisis this happened to me. No amount of threatening or cajoling would get them to release my images to my designated 2nd opinion.

To put it simply, anyone claiming HIPAA is the reason for that is just lying (since HIPAA has no such requirement) and would invent some other excuse -- or simply refuse without explanation -- without HIPAA. In fact, HIPAA patient access requirement mandates that patients have access to, and a right to receive copies of, their records under most circumstances, and refusal to provide such access is an actionable violation of HIPAA -- without HIPAA, there would be no recourse.

Pre HIPAA I never had a problem obtaining my records. The trouble is less-knowledgeable health gatekeepers are relentlessly indoctrinated into believing that privacy is paramount. A records request that doesn't follow a rigid checklist is defaulted to REJECT. And it is in the name of protecting the patient's privacy.

You'd be surprised how it's worked out in reality though... I'm not against what HIPAA was meant to do. I just with the actual circumstances allowed for the more easy communications system that was hoped for... not filling out 100+ fields across 4-5 pages when seeing a new doctor for the first time.

No, I wouldn't be surprised, having worked in the field for most of the time that HIPAA has been in force, and having had experience with trying to get information released by health entities before HIPAA. While HIPAA's requirements may allow more room for inconvenience than they should, and plenty of covered entities fall short of the requirements, the situation is miles better than it was without HIPAA, where such information was often treated as proprietary, competitive information and there was no general mandate -- and thus no recourse in many cases -- for disclosure to the patient.

And most of the history you fill out when seeing a new doctor has nothing to do with whether or not they can get old records -- they want the same information even if they have the old records.