Invasive! Who's gutting the laws that keep your medical records private? The feds are--and soon, Texas may too.

Publication: Texas Monthly

Publication Date: 01-NOV-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Texas Monthly, Inc.

Since when are my medical records no longer private? Since April 14, 2003. Although the concept of a patient's right to privacy dates back more than two thousand years to the creation of the Hippocratic oath, the Bush administration recently made an official change to the so-called privacy rule in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal law governing the electronic exchange of patient information between doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies. The original HIPAA rule, written in 1996, gave patients the strict right of consent before any of their records were shared; the new rule eliminates the...

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