U.S. Medical Privacy Law Gutted
In the U.S., medical privacy is largely governed by a 1996 law called HIPAA. Among many other provisions, HIPAA regulates the privacy and security surrounding electronic medical records. HIPAA specifies civil penalties against companies that don’t comply with the regulations, as well as criminal penalties against individuals and corporations who knowingly steal or misuse patient data.
The civil penalties have long been viewed as irrelevant by the health care industry. Now the criminal penalties have been gutted:
An authoritative new ruling by the Justice Department sharply limits the government’s ability to prosecute people for criminal violations of the law that protects the privacy of medical records.
The criminal penalties, the department said, apply to insurers, doctors, hospitals and other providers—but not necessarily their employees or outsiders who steal personal health data.
In short, the department said, people who work for an entity covered by the federal privacy law are not automatically covered by that law and may not be subject to its criminal penalties, which include a $250,000 fine and 10 years in prison for the most serious violations.
This is a complicated issue. Peter Swire worked extensively on this bill as the President’s Chief Counselor for Privacy, and I am going to quote him extensively. First, a story about someone who was convicted under the criminal part of this statute.
In 2004 the U.S. Attorney in Seattle announced that Richard Gibson was being indicted for violating the HIPAA privacy law. Gibson was a phlebotomist a lab assistant in a hospital. While at work he accessed the medical records of a person with a terminal cancer condition. Gibson then got credit cards in the patient’s name and ran up over $9,000 in charges, notably for video game purchases. In a statement to the court, the patient said he “lost a year of life both mentally and physically dealing with the stress” of dealing with collection agencies and other results of Gibson’s actions. Gibson signed a plea agreement and was sentenced to 16 months in jail.
According to this Justice Department ruling, Gibson was wrongly convicted. I presume his attorney is working on the matter, and I hope he can be re-tried under our identity theft laws. But because Gibson (or someone else like him) was working in his official capacity, he cannot be prosecuted under HIPAA. And because Gibson (or someone like him) was doing something not authorized by his employer, the hospital cannot be prosecuted under HIPAA.
The healthcare industry has been opposed to HIPAA from the beginning, because it puts constraints on their business in the name of security and privacy. This ruling comes after intense lobbying by the industry at the Department of Heath and Human Services and the Justice Department, and is the result of an HHS request for an opinion.
From Swire’s analysis the Justice Department ruling.
For a law professor who teaches statutory interpretation, the OLC opinion is terribly frustrating to read. The opinion reads like a brief for one side of an argument. Even worse, it reads like a brief that knows it has the losing side but has to come out with a predetermined answer.
I’ve been to my share of HIPAA security conferences. To the extent that big health is following the HIPAA law—and to a large extent, they’re waiting to see how it’s enforced—they are doing so because of the criminal penalties. They know that the civil penalties aren’t that large, and are a cost of doing business. But the criminal penalties were real. Now that they’re gone, the pressure on big health to protect patient privacy is greatly diminished.
Again Swire:
The simplest explanation for the bad OLC opinion is politics. Parts of the health care industry lobbied hard to cancel HIPAA in 2001. When President Bush decided to keep the privacy rule—quite possibly based on his sincere personal views—the industry efforts shifted direction. Industry pressure has stopped HHS from bringing a single civil case out of the 13,000 complaints. Now, after a U.S. Attorney’s office had the initiative to prosecute Mr. Gibson, senior officials in Washington have clamped down on criminal enforcement. The participation of senior political officials in the interpretation of a statute, rather than relying on staff attorneys, makes this political theory even more convincing.
This kind of thing is bigger than the security of the healthcare data of Americans. Our administration is trying to collect more data in its attempt to fight terrorism. Part of that is convincing people—both Americans and foreigners—that this data will be protected. When we gut privacy protections because they might inconvenience business, we’re telling the world that privacy isn’t one of our core concerns.
If the administration doesn’t believe that we need to follow its medical data privacy rules, what makes you think they’re following the FISA rules?
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Israel Torres • June 7, 2005 12:40 PM
With all this flux in privacy and security it is no wonder that we recently were informed that for quite a while convicted sex offenders were getting free viagra.
Israel Torres