What might happen if the current Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act, did not exist?

Question

Why are policies needed to stop information abuse, what types of information could be abused, by whom, and how?

Answer 1

Your private health information could be accessed by people other than doctors and insurance companies attending to your care. What people don't know is that there are countless individuals that see this information during the course of handling a claim. In many cases you are a nobody to the person reading this information and in a perfect world, the processing system would not provide sufficient access to one operator to glean anything of value. However, things can and do slip through the cracks. Another item that has received little press is that even though we have HIPAA on the books here in the US, many companies store their data overseas where HIPAA is meaningless. You and I have no control of who is viewing that data in another country and might be doing what with it.