Legal Aspects of Health Care

Legal Aspects of Health Care (HIPAA)

The idea of the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA) was to implement a policy that would protect the rights of patients who deemed confidentiality as a high priority in the healthcare industry. It was so that they could feel as if they had more say in everything that was occurring in their healthcare lives. With this policy in place, the health care industry had the duty of directly protecting what individual's deemed as being most important: their privacy. Health care records once used to be accessible to anyone who had any slight curiosity in finding out what was occurring in the lives of any individual. Family members were once able to access medical records whenever they wanted to call in and inquire any sort of information. Without this policy however, individuals would have lost absolutely all confidentiality in healthcare. Some patients would not feel comfortable discussing this type of information with their family members, and under the implementation of HIPAA, patients won control over something very personal.

Before HIPAA, anyone who worked in any healthcare setting was able to access anyone's healthcare information. If a temporary intern wanted to see why it was that a person they knew was being seen at an office, they were able to do so. This, of course, put the patient's healthcare lives at a place where they had absolutely no right to discretion. It became a safety hazard to actually have people's health records out in the open. Individual's who feared being exposed to someone else's judgment would instead stop from going to a healthcare setting so that people would not find out what it was that was occurring to them. Legal medical measures that had to be taken in advance so that people's live would not be at risk, because individuals would actually postpone treatment for the fear of being judged about something that a patient was embarrassed about. It became more of a public health issue to not enforce the rights of individuals who sought medical attention for a pertinent matter.