They will charge you for copying and there is a statutory cap on what they can charge.

Nobody tells you this.

There is no point at which anybody in a hospital says to a grieving woman: by the way, everything that happened in this building is written down and it belongs to you and you can have it.

They are not hiding it.

It simply never comes up, because the people who would tell you are the people who assume you already know, and because a woman four days post-partum is not thinking about records custodians.

So I asked.