The tipster to Isthmus pegged it as a cover-up. On two occasions in mid-September, the caller said, linemen working for MGE were zapped with high voltage, resulting in serious injury. Both accidents purportedly involved "management error."
"Both linemen lived," the caller related. One was said to have been left with external burn injuries that required skin graft surgery; the other's injuries were internal. Both ended up at the UW Hospital's burn unit.
MGE spokesman Steve Kraus initially confirmed that two linemen were injured in separate incidents, but suggested the caller's information, as related to him, seemed "overblown a bit."
"Any contact with electricity is certainly serious," said Kraus. But the men's injuries were "not life-threatening."
Well, just how serious were they? Were the men still in the hospital, or have they been released? Kraus said he needed to look into it.
He did, and responded as follows: "HIPAA comes into it and we can't release anything on the health of those workers."
HIPAA, which stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a federal law passed in 1996. Its medical privacy rules took effect in 2003. These have in many cases shut down public access to information that used to be routinely available.
Kraus seemed chagrined by what he perceived to be the law's constraints. He found it "frustrating" to have to give vague answers to questions about the workers' conditions. He said HIPAA even prevented MGE from sharing this information with other employees.
"We did not issue an internal bulletin of the condition of these two employees," he said.
Ruth Heitz, general counsel of the Wisconsin Medical Society, says it's unclear whether and to what extent HIPAA's protections extend to private employers. The law's privacy protections expressly apply to "covered entities" like health providers, insurers and employers with self-insured health plans. But, she adds, "HIPAA is fairly complex and it requires a careful analysis as to who is covered."
Even if HIPAA did not prevent the company from revealing health information, other rules might. For instance, she says, "If I needed to take a leave of absence {from the Medical Society] because of a health situation, that would not be covered by HIPAA but it would still be confidential."
Mae Knowles, a spokesperson at Meriter, says Wisconsin had some pretty strong medical privacy protections even before HIPAA was enacted. But she acknowledges it does erect some fresh constraints regarding the release of medical information.
"I can't even give you a condition report without you providing me with the name of the person you're inquiring about," she says. In the past, there were times when the media would inquire, say, about an unidentified person hurt in a gang fight. Access to this information might help quell retaliatory actions caused by false rumors -- for instance, that the person had died. "As a result of HIPAA, we can no longer do that."
Indeed, in some circumstances the hospital is not able to release any information without the patient's consent. Knowles says it's come up sometimes with athletes, as when a football player is injured during a game.
"Everybody saw it on the field. They know the player was taken to the hospital. But if the player doesn't agree, we can't release information."
But Knowles sees an upside to HIPAA. "It puts the person in control of their information," she says. "The spirit of HIPAA is to keep the patient in control."
Beyond not authorizing the release of information, patients have the option of asking for a blanket ban. As Knowles explains it, "If flowers come in, if mail comes in, if there are phone calls for them, it all gets sent back, because for all public purposes that person does not exist at this hospital."
Like Kraus, she sometimes finds the constraints frustrating: "There are times when we know that information on the street is wrong, but we can't do anything about it because of HIPAA."