1. Not to pick nits, but the statute's acronym is 'HIPAA' ("HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 1996").
2. HIPAA is a thing from the Clinton Administration.
3. Liberals were furious that HIPAA's privacy policy didn't go far enough when the Patriot Act actually provided a clause where the government spooks could examine someone's medical records for national security reasons. I can find lots of web pages demonstrating this liberal outrage by Googling 'HIPAA Outrage'.
4. Conservatives were angry about HIPAA because we expected that it would prevent businesses from declining to hire a food service worker with Hepatitis or schoolteachers with AIDS or airline pilots with epilepsy, or whatever. Liberals celebrated that and thought it didn't go far enough.
5. I am pretty sure that there is at least one thread in the FR archives from around 1998 or so where we were talking about HIPAA and remarked that 'Just wait until some whackjob who should be denied a handgun under the Brady Bill gets one anyway because of medical confidentiality laws'.
5. My sentiments exactly, TigersEye: Up yours, Fineman, you four-eyed nerdface.
Thanks, KGR Kid, for clarifying my poorly made point and straightening out my acronymic derangement. I think I associate HIPAA with hippo because it is such an overweight, ungainly, ugly and useless as a hippo on dry land POS piece of legislation.
I recall going to an osteopath a few years ago to get my back cracked but before he could even ask me how I felt I had to fill out the HIPAA forms. Seemed like 36 pages of BS, supposedly to protect me but with every line I read I felt like I was signing more and more of my rights away. But thank God no one will ever know I have neck pain! /s