How HIPAA Was Transformed From “The Secret Service” to “The TSA” For Your Privacy
A very strange law, once intended to protect your privacy, now, with theatrical flair, does not.
The worst thing that ever happened to privacy and healthcare? HIPAA and the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The law of unintended consequences is perhaps the only law our current Supreme Court is interested in upholding the prescient of! The right to an abortion was based on the court’s enumeration of a federal right to privacy.
This article is about what happens when that right to privacy is abruptly pulled away, like the bottom block of a Jenga puzzle, leaving us with nonsensical regulation. HIPAA is now a bad law. This is not just because it is a wildly misspelled acronym1 on the regular. It’s because it’s a law that— absent federal regulation about what privacy must be respected by state and local governments —creates a backdoor into personal information for over-ambitious state lawmakers, while still getting in the way of meaningful communication in healthcare. This is especially true as it relates to the care of psychiatric patients, in the most vulner…