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.