"HIPAA was a mistake". Yes, and this is true for almost all of the "precautionary principle" regulations, from GMO restrictions in Europe to AI regulations across US states.
Rather than imagining all the things that might go wrong and seeking to prevent them, let the marketplace work and if and when things actually do go wrong, regulate *then* based on real-world harms not fantasies.
I wrote about the insanity of "medical privacy."
It's hard now to do research that could cure major diseases because we are too worried about the handling of people's personal data, which they themselves appear not to care about.
HIPAA was a mistake. https://www.richardhanania.com/p/privacy-versus-progress-in-medicine