The story exceeds my suspension of disbelief. What particular jumps out at me is the backwards details - nobody off the street knows what "TPA" means, sure, but everybody who's ever gone to see a doctor knows what HIPAA is, even if they think it's called "HIPPA".

I think you are rather over-estimating the degree to which people read those standard forms: it’s akin to expecting everyone to read the full text on the “Are you sure?” dialog before clicking OK.

I don't know if I read the forms, but so what? Many if not most people don't do their own taxes, but they know generally what the IRS is and what it does.

I ONLY know of HIPAA from my work. Maybe it was on a medical form.. I don't visit the doctor much, can't recall.

I worked at a networking hardware startup outside Silicon Valley many years ago (during the first dotcom boom). It was run by two people, father and son, with no technical experience -- one previously ran a garbage collection company, as I recall, and the other was a sales guy -- and shortly after I started, I learned that the antics of them and their cronies had caused the entire engineering staff to have over 100% turnover in less than a year. Not only was no one left at the company who had originally had anything to do with the product's design, there was no one left at the company who had worked with anyone who originally had anything to do with the product's design. During the barely two years I worked there, the company had a system architect who talked about "making the code more flamboyant" and eventually fled the country for legal reasons, had a cold war between that architect and another executive in which the former was (badly) installing spyware on the latter's laptop, had the CEO earnestly tell us about how a former engineer had put, quote, "death code" into the system that the CEO had found and removed himself (this is, again, a man with no programming experience and the former engineer worked on the system-level C code; if he'd put "death code" in there, the CEO would not have been able to find it); on and on and on.

tl;dr: small tech companies run by completely non-technical people may not always be shit shows, but when they are shit shows, the shit can be pretty unbelievable.

Maybe it's bull. But it has the ring of truth to it, to me, and I've worked for a few healthcare startups. A lot of developers think of themselves as "just developers" and a lot of people are brutally incurious about the world until it hits them in the face.

> ... are brutally incurious ...

This is an amazing phrase.

Thank you. I try sometimes. ;)

Yeah, but the world generally hits you in the face by the time you turn 18 or maybe even before.

About some things, sure.

Not necessarily medical privacy.

Thirded.

Work at a hospital and in the orientation the first speech is given by the head of compliance who goes over what executives have gone to jail, why, and all the underlings that have been fired for seemingly innocuous HIPAA or PHI violations (looking at a friend's chart, posting on social media, etc).

The money sounds nice but OP could probably make the same at somewhere more reputable with less a chance of feds walking in and taking everything.

>You can't spend that $165K a year when you're staring down the barrel of willful HIPAA violations.

It's much harder for the government to take back your $165k after you've spent it all. Sure they'll garnish your wages but they'll do that either way so you may as well live a little in the meantime.