The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is the most significant federal health care legislation in more than 20 years. Although marketed as a modest attempt to address health insurance portability and job lock for insured workers, HIPAA in fact substantially expanded the role of the federal government in controlling private health care arrangements. Prior to HIPAA, the federal government had largely avoided direct regulation of private health insurance and had deferred to the states. Essentially, HIPAA made it somewhat easier for currently insured workers to retain their access to group health insurance coverage when they changed jobs, provided they were employed by other firms that also offered group health coverage.

How HIPAA Has Failed

HIPAA has done little to improve consumers' access to individual market coverage, and its regulatory provisions have increased the overall cost of coverage.

HIPAA threatens physicians with potential prosecution for loosely drawn "federal health care offenses."

HIPAA's medical privacy regulations obscure private markets for health information under the cloud of complex, costly, and contradictory commands.

HIPAA's highly restrictive pilot project for medical savings accounts (MSAs) may well have set back the overall private MSA market.

HIPAA's regulatory structure creates legal uncertainty and increases the risk of contradictory and duplicative regulatory treatment for defined-contribution health plans.

About This Conference

Our keynote speaker will be Rep. Dick Armey, House Majority Leader, who will compare the promises and performance of HIPAA, after five years of evidence.

Panel One will review the effects of HIPAA's portability reforms on the availability and affordability of health insurance in small group and individual markets.

Panel Two will examine the development of HIPAA's medical privacy regulations, their likely effects on the market for health care information, and policy alternatives.

Our luncheon speaker will be Richard Epstein, interim dean of the University of Chicago Law School and author of Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care.

Panel Three will assess the growing "criminalization" of medical practice in the name of fraud and abuse control and will analyze HIPAA's effects on the quality of health care.

The final panel will explore how HIPAA has reshaped health insurance regulation, outline the barriers it has created to health care innovation, and offer alternatives to greater federal control.

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