The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 was enacted by the United States Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It was sponsored by Sen. Nancy Kassebaum .
Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs.
Title II of HIPAA, known as the Administrative Simplification (AS) provisions, requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers.
A major goal of the Privacy Rule is to assure that individuals’ health information is properly protected while allowing the flow of health information needed to provide and promote high quality health care and to protect the public's health and well being. The Rule strikes a balance that permits important uses of information, while protecting the privacy of people who seek care and healing. Given that the health care marketplace is diverse, the Rule is designed to be flexible and comprehensive to cover the variety of uses and disclosures that need to be addressed.
HIPAA required the Secretary to issue privacy regulations governing individually identifiable health information, if Congress did not enact privacy legislation within three years of the passage of HIPAA. Because Congress did not enact privacy legislation, HHS developed a proposed rule and released it for public comment on November 3, 1999. The Department received over 52,000 public comments. The final regulation, the Privacy Rule, was published December 28, 2000.2
In March 2002, the Department proposed and released for public comment modifications to the Privacy Rule. The Department received over 11,000 comments.The final modifications were published in final form on August 14, 2002.
