So - sausage is done, and we’re labeling our bags ‘o’ meat with the sharpie. I asked Chuck to label it all ‘Super Tuesday Sausage’. He then related the story of how he and Kate used to help his grandmother, Meme, put up vegetables in the summer when they’d stay with her and their grandfather in the summer. Apparently, Pop and Meme ate a lot of ‘Kate is dumb, Charles is the greatest - corn’. Freezer graffiti.

What a worn, yet entirely appropriate metaphor for our democracy at work. So, I’m liveblogging Chuck’s sausage making AND the SuperTuesday results as they roll in. Right now, Chuck has just finished mixing together spices for the world’s best breakfast sausage (I mean that very seriously) which smells incredible - sage, thyme, rosemary, cayenne, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. And Chris Matthews won’t shut up about evangelicals in Georgia. As if I don’t hear enough about that at work. And Chris Matthews is the Dick Vitale of political reporting. Regardless, this is just another regular night at the Balog household - Chuck is so uninterested in the political significance of February 5th that he’s making his own sausage like it’s 1895, and I’m so interested that I’m yelling at the TV about every 30 seconds and talking to myself. We’re made for each other, obviously.

It’s obscene to me the amount of red tape and false authority that HIPAA has created. Especially among medical records managers. The biggest problem is that HIPAA allows for providers to charge cost recovery for sending medical records to patients. There’s been no legal challenge on the matter of what the cost should actually be.

Case in point is my doc in Virginia. I called and asked for my records to be sent to my new doc here in Georgia. They were total PITAs about the whole thing. First, they wanted to charge me $.50 per page for the records. When I reminded them that they needed to be sent directly to my Dr.’s office, they balked and said they would need a release form (which is optional under HIPAA). They were just doing it to be difficult assholes. So, I called the GA Dr. and asked them to interdict on my behalf. Same BS about a release. So, I FAX’ed them a stupid BS release authorizing the release of my records to the GA doc on the same day. They took it upon themselves to send the records to me, instead of my doc and try to charge me $14 (including an elevated amount for postage which is currently illegal). The postage as marked was $1.81, and the amount charged was $3, which is mail fraud in and of itself. So, I wrote them a kind letter explaining that I never asked for my records and that they can stick the fee.

Anyway, just a rant on that. Kelsey Seybold in Houston couldn’t have an easier process. Download the form, fill it out, and fax it to them. They fax your materials to the provider you specify with no problems.

I’m not advocating a central store of medical records like Google and MS propose, but it sure would be nice to be able to get everything from one place and have it be under my control.