My physician gave my meds away to another patient. Has he broken any laws? I receive my essential medication through a patient assistance program for the needy. They are not a controlled substance. The patient assistance program does not send medications directly to needy patients. As such, my meds are sent directly to my physician for my sole use. My physician gave away my medication to another patient. Now I don't have access to my medication. The cost of my medication is about $900. I don't have $900. I have tried to work with my physician and his staff to replace it, but have been unsuccessful for over a month. I keep getting excuses even though I have been assertive by calling every week begging for my medication. The patient assistance program will not send another batch of my meds, because they have signed proof that my meds were delivered to my physician. Has my physician broken any laws?
IANAL, and I don't live in America, but some of this depends on their intent. If they gave the drugs away by mistake, they probably have not broken any laws. If they were given away deliberately (and you would need to prove this &ndash; which might be hard) then yes, he has broken laws. Either way, I expect you have a right to compensation (i.e. $900) from the physician to "make you whole again." If required necessary you could file for that in your local small claims court: The physician will either come to the party pretty quickly and sort it out, or the court will award you the money you need to buy the replacement meds. (But you will need to evidence the replacement cost, for a start....)
Am I correct in arguing that the LHD never really had implied consent to begin with? In other words, does the failure to honour the express refusal inform us about the legitimacy of prior claims of implied consent? No. They had implied consent and had not intent at the outset to dishonor it. They have violated the patient's privacy right when consent was expressly withdrawn, and they discovered that they cannot easily comply and therefore did not comply. The fact that they have made it expensive for themselves to comply with their legal obligations going forward does not imply that they lacked implied consent at the outset, so they should have no liability for the time period from when the training materials started to be used until the time when implied consent ended. They are only responsible going forward for their failure to honor the patient's wishes. It is not at all exceptional for a legal obligation to turn out to be more difficult to comply with when it arises than was anticipated when the systems that make the legal obligation difficult to comply with were implemented. Health care companies aren't expected to be prophets who can foresee the complex confluence of factors that has painted them in a corner, particularly when a situation has never come up before the current one. It is likely that no one person was ever even simultaneously aware of all the facts necessary to know that this could happen. Someone in the IT department will often not be intimately familiar with what is going on in the training part of the operation and what the privacy rules that apply are and even if someone was, that someone may have been in no position to do anything about it at the time. Health care providers aren't supposed to be evaluated with 20-20 hindsight. Given that they almost surely did not and could not easily have known that they had made a future express withdrawal of consent very difficult to effectuate, scienter can't be attributed to it. And, honestly, they are in more than enough trouble simply trying to deal with the problem post-express withdrawal of consent when they did start to violate privacy laws.
In this statement of &quot;Patient Rights &amp; Responsibilities from Nash UNC it is said that: A patient has the right to know the names and the jobs of his or her caregivers. But I do not find any actual law that establishes such a right. Hospitals usually have a policy that doctors and other caregivers must wear name-tags and identify themselves to patients, but that does not necessarily apply to questions after the fact, nor can I be sure that any law mandates such a policy.
I think the officer is probably lying, not just mistaken, but they are not required to always be truthful. In addition to the law against possessing ID with intent to commit, or to aid or abet, any crime, it is also against the law to be knowingly in possession of a stolen credit card, or any other property. An example of a strict-liability possession crime, which the officer knows of, is that it is a crime to possess heroin, period. I am skeptical that the officer actually believes that there is a law making it a crime to be in possession of a credit card with permission, and suspect that he thinks it is stolen.
Yes. HIPPA does not apply to exchanges of information between professors and students, it only governs disclosures of medical information by medical providers and insurance companies. Educational privacy laws might prohibit the professor from sharing that information with someone outside the educational institution, but that is a different question entirely, than whether this information can be requested from a student. If you have a disagreement with the professor's decision, your remedy would be to ask the department chair, or the dean with jurisdiction over that professor, or provost (a.k.a. the chief academic officer) at the institution to reconsider this decision (ordinarily, in that order).
This is not a HIPAA violation. HIPAA requires that personal information not be revealed to people lacking a statutorily-defined interest, without the patient's consent. A password itself is not "personal information", though having it could lead to such information. An example of personal information would be the fact that you personally had a certain tooth filled (not that "somebody had a tooth filled"). Protected information can be revealed to certain people, such as the lab that they send samples to, or your insurance company. This is covered by what is known as "The Privacy Rule". There is a related rule, the Security Rule, which essentially says "you need to keep information safe". An example of a required security rule standard is that the provider must Implement policies and procedures to address the final disposition of electronic protected health information, and/or the hardware or electronic media on which it is stored HHS recommends degaussing, but other means of satisfying the rule exist (burning, dissolving in acid). Tossing in the trash would not satisfy the rule. Password management falls under the weaker category of "addressable", that is, a provider needs to think about how they will manage passwords, but there is no specific requirement regarding what you have to do (unlike the requirements of Data Backup, Written Contract. Incident Reporting or Media Disposal). Printing and distributing to customers your account and password would, on the other hand, be a reportable incident. Information about your name, the dental procedure done, and the cost of the procedure, is probably also on the paperwork that they give you, and that even more than your password is protected information. A provider is allowed, indeed required, to disclose protected information to the patient. The assumption is that once you have processed that information, you will destroy or protect the paperwork, as you see fit.
There are vendors providing software to facilitate this sort of task. Avalara is perhaps the best known, but I don't have any experience with it and couldn't say whether it's actually any good or not. But the bottom line is that in a destination-based sourcing regime, sales taxes must be computed based on the address of the destination, not city or ZIP code associated with that address. As Avalara has noted, this is a giant hassle, but it's nonetheless the current state of the law. Of course, this assumes the seller has sufficient nexus with Louisiana to trigger a duty to collect sales taxes in the first place. From the question, it is not clear whether this is true.
A medical practitioner may use whatever methods s/he thinks proper and appropriate, subject to the limits of malpractice law, and to the right of the patient (or patient's parent or guardian for a child) to give informed consent to any procedure or treatment. A patient can not insist on a treatment or method that the doctor or dentist does not wish to perform, having only the right to seek another practitioner. Nor is a practitioner required to use only procedures covered by insurance, unless bound by contract to do so (as may be the case with some &quot;in-network&quot; or HMO agreements). Again, the patient is free to seek treatment elsewhere. So the parent could insist that the dentist not use &quot;conscious sedation&quot; by withholding consent, the dentist may then refuse to treat at all, unless perhaps this was an emergency situation not allowing the parent to seek another treatment venue.