Since Congress’s 1996 enactment of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), patients have been guaranteed certain protections regarding their healthcare. HIPAA is broad in its scope, but its basic provisions are as follows:

1. HIPAA protects "workers" and their "covered families" health coverage should they change or lose their jobs.

2. It sets standards for an electronic data system to make healthcare information readily available to all healthcare entities involved in a patient’s care.

3. It prohibits group health plans from limiting availability or fixing premiums based on medical history, physical or mental disability or genetic predispositions to disease. (This provision does not apply to private insurers.)

4. It creates time limits on a group health plan’s right to refuse benefits for a previously uninsured person’s preexisting condition(s) to a maximum of 12-18 months. In most cases, patients who have transferred to a group health plan directly from an existing health plan are eligible to have these terms reduced or eliminated.

5. It prohibits individual healthcare plans from refusing coverage to persons able to establish that they had group coverage for the previous 18 months, and eliminates gaps in coverage for preexisting conditions. Exceptions are patients currently eligible for group or government-subsidized coverage.

6. It contains specific regulations to help protect "patients" and their "covered families" privacy.

7. HIPAA defines and describes penalties related to healthcare system fraud, abuse and negligent or illegal disclosure of patient information. It demands that all healthcare entities (including healthcare organizations and their employees, individual providers, billing agencies, clearinghouses, etc.) follow specific privacy protocols to insure information security.

8. It creates mandates to prevent loss of patient medical information due to system, electronic or personnel failure or abuse and/or natural disaster.