# Medical Records Access Fairness Act of 2024

Right now, when you ask your doctor or hospital for a copy of your medical records, they can charge you a fee for providing them. This bill would change that by making it free for you to get copies of your own health information in most situations. The only times a healthcare provider could charge you a fee would be if you're asking for a duplicate copy of records they already gave you earlier in the same year, or if you want a paper copy of information they've already made available to you online for free.

The practical effect is straightforward: if you need your medical records to share with another doctor, get a second opinion, or just have them for your own records, you shouldn't have to pay for that first copy. This matters because medical record fees can add up quickly—some providers charge per page or per hour of staff time to compile records, which can cost anywhere from twenty to several hundred dollars depending on how extensive your medical history is. Under this bill, those costs would disappear for most people's initial requests.

There are a couple of important exceptions to keep in mind. If a healthcare provider sends your records directly to another provider at your request, they can do so in whatever format works best for both of them. Also, if you ask your doctor to provide records to your lawyer, the provider could still charge a fee for that—the bill specifically says it doesn't require free copies for attorneys. The bill gives the Department of Health and Human Services six months to write the detailed rules for how this would work, and the changes would take effect about six months after that, so there would be a roughly one-year timeline before this actually goes into effect.