Hannah Soyer
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This past week, the Iowa Department of Human Services announced that it had accidentally distributed confidential information of 425 Iowans living in nursing homes. The information that was leaked included the people’s names, insurance or government-program information, name of the current facilities they reside in, and Medicaid state identification.

This distribution of information is a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Human Services said it was involved in around 100 such violations last year.

While the facilities that received this information have confirmed that the papers have been shredded and the information properly disposed of, such incidents should even occur in the first place. The health act is something that was put in place to make sure care providers don’t share confidential information without the client’s or patient’s consent. It is an act created by the government, and so it is a bit ironic that a branch of the government was found to be violating this act so abundantly.

I don’t believe this most recent violation was something done on purpose or with malicious intent. Most likely, it was simply a mistake that occurred from things not being organized or efficient. As someone with a disability, my family has been dealing with the Iowa Human Services since I was a small child, because it decides the amount of help I receive and what type of help I receive.

From my own experiences with the Human Services, I can say that it is one of the more inefficiently run organizations I’ve come into contact with. But I don’t think it’s the fault of any individual employee, I think it’s the fact the agency is so big, and so bureaucratic, that each person employed has so many things to handle, and sometimes things fall through the cracks.

Still, this isn’t an excuse for what has happened, and it isn’t an excuse for other instances in which Human Services has let its clients’ needs come second. I’m not sure what the solution is, but it may come from making the agency smaller, or at least into smaller, separate divisions in which each case can be handled more effectively. It’s a problem with our government in general: too much red tape, too many hoops to jump through, and therefore very few things get done.

Conservatives may argue that the answer to this problem is to privatize government, starting with such organizations as Human Services. If there was a way to make sure that doing so did not compromise the integrity and accessibility of a democratic government, then I would be all for this. But I’m not sure this is possible. Either way, something needs to change to prevent this kind of a violation from happening again.