Clearly, some people shouldn't have access to your medical records. In a day when technology creates a host of possibilities, it would be wrong to allow, say, a bank to check its customer list against a medical database and call in the mortgages of customers with cancer.

But it's also ridiculous, and potentially harmful, to lock away important medical and patient information from people who should have access to it.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known by its acronym, HIPAA, tries to walk that fine line, but it fails. If anything, the law has created a confusion that causes medical providers to err on the side of secrecy — even ridiculous secrecy. In part, this is because the federal law comes with the threat of jail time or large fines for anyone who violates it. In part, it comes from the law itself.

As a story in this newspaper noted this week, a one-page media guide to HIPAA says that, in the event of a widespread natural disaster or other emergency, hospitals could release only the gender and age groups of patients being treated. If a large earthquake struck the Wasatch Front, the law would prevent loved ones from getting information on whether a relative was being treated at a specific hospital. They would have to guess whether the 70-year-old man at a particular hospital was Grandpa.

That's simply ridiculous. Luckily, local hospitals told reporters they would likely bend those rules to aid the public, hoping to receive forgiveness later.

There are other silly applications of HIPAA. It keeps a mother from being with a child during a traumatic procedure, such as a CT scan, simply because the mother might see charts belonging to other patients.

Lawmakers who voted for this law should explain why such procedures make sense. If they can't come up with a reasonable justification, they should go back and change the wording. Protecting people from fraud is one thing. Keeping loved ones from necessary information is another.

In Utah, HIPAA's effect is compounded by a medical establishment that keeps the public from learning much about the successes and failures of individual hospitals, or about the records of individual doctors. To people with health problems, it can begin to look as if they have entered a Franz Kafka novel, where matters of simple procedure take on a nightmarish and illogical quality.

It isn't entirely clear how the public is being protected by such a system.