The fashion in health care’s “policy sphere” is to fix logistical problems by making having the problem itself illegal. That’s… not going to work. Consider, from Forbes: “How Safe Are Your Medical Records?”

Notification laws are slowly changing as part of the stimulus bill, which has mandated new accounting rules. Physicians will now be required to track disclosures of a patient’s medical information and disclose security breaches in some cases. The new rules won’t go into effect until 2014.

Really. So, if problem is a policy lapse due to an bloated, unresponsive, overloaded health care bureaucracy, then the solution is to force all medical providers to keep Yet Another Huge Binder of Legalese (Yes, the dreaded Yahble) for which you are Legally Liable to Keep A Copy In Your Office At All Times

Genius! I’ll just organize another meeting and invent another acronym. That will be ten million dollars to my Health Care Information Technology consulting firm, please. (Unless, of course, you don’t mind being declared a Federally Deficient Medical Provider. Can you really afford that legal liability? Oh, by the way, we noted in our report that your hospital has a ten million dollar budget discrepancy this year. We advise a hiring freeze in IT, investment in a clock-punch payroll system for physicians, and cuts in “loss-leading” non-surgical, non-specialist departments like primary, preventative, and hospice care.)

Listen: it’s silly to make things that are already illegal “double illegal.” For example, it’s already clearly against “company policy” to steal cash from the cash register at a medical office —not to mention illegal. There’s no need to Really Really say so in a Yahble. That’s true for cash; that’s true for medical records.

It was illegal in Soviet Union to be inefficient, too. That didn’t make their institutions more productive. That just gave anybody an excuse to prosecute political and economic deviants because, hey, there’s policy for everything. Everybody’s already criminal. We just haven’t gotten around to prosecuting you yet —and do you really want to fight this battle? (ref: U.S. intellectual property law.  ever been accused of “trademark” or “patent” infringement? you’d understand)