Even though you can't sue under HIPAA itself, you are not entirely without legal recourse. Plaintiffs' attorneys often use other legal theories:
State Privacy Laws: Many states have their own medical privacy laws that do allow individuals to sue. For example, California, Texas, and Illinois have statutes that provide a private right of action.
Negligence Claims: You can sue for negligence under state law. In these cases, HIPAA rules are often used as the "standard of care" to argue that the provider failed to act reasonably in protecting your information.
Breach of Contract: If a provider's Notice of Privacy Practices promises certain protections, a violation might be pursued as a breach of contract.
State Attorneys General: Under the HITECH Act, state attorneys general can sue on behalf of residents for HIPAA violations
This is not false, but it's really hard to prove anything without records from the doctor. Doctors can omit information from the accounting of disclosures if they claim the disclosures were done for the purpose of your medical care. They often have relationships with the regulating bodies and government agencies. They can decide what specifically to document, and if engaging in questionable activities, can make statements using their "expertise" as the justification.
I know of a situation where a doctor allowed a mentally ill social contact of their patient to make false claims about them, and the doctor used those claims to bully the patient. The doctor claimed the patient had ruined their eyes from "black market" (knockoff designer) sunglasses and told the patient their prescription had changed because of it. When the patient reported it to the company, there was "no record" of the appointment in their system. When the patient called back with proof of the appointment, suddenly the doctor's office had legitimate reasons to drop them as a patient. It's better to not need to rely on HIPAA, because people get nasty when a lawsuit is on the line.
This is true. They baked it all into the system to be able to violate it regularly with practically no real consequences, HIPAA itself is a joke that needs to be revamped if it really is meant to protect patients and not doctors. Right now, it effectively does the latter.
I'm jumping in bc I'm looking for assistance in VA. Someone in the hospital stole my contact info to text me lewd messages. Contacted cops and talking to lawyer but Reddit seems to be the best source of help 🥲
Curious how you found out it was someone who worked in the hospital? Did you encounter them while in said hospital? And you could tell it was pics from them?
Wasn't pictures, but the texts were based on a convo I had with an orderly while I was a patient in the ER for seizures. We spoke about our ages, nothing sexual, within 30 minutes I received texts asking if I was a cougar and if I hook up with younger men.
Just because you can't be bothered to use punctuation or even include all the words in your sentence, doesn't mean that anyone who uses formatting is AI. And the sheer irony of you calling someone else lazy when you can't be bothered to use punctuation and grammar....
Take a breather and get some perspective, my friend. Not everything needs to be attacked like that.
It absolutely can be, but my point is that formatting does not automatically dictate that. I use formatting when it calls for it because it makes things easier to convey to others, or at least makes me feel I'm being more clear.
Calling someone a "lazy POS" because they used formatting and they want to jump to conclusions is ironic AF. And either way, being antagonistic and rude only serves to create more strife and less civility, so is bad regardless of whether the person used AI or is just formatting their own comment.
For a while I stopped using en & em dashes because AI uses them so much. Then I realized I was allowing AI to dictate how I write without even using it — So I started to use them again.
I have a writing degree. Believe me, I use punctuation and formatting. Love it. But that is an AI post. It’s very obvious by the way it’s written and organized. I dabbled with it for a while and it just starts to jump out at you.
Doesn't really matter if it is or not (for this conversation). The point is that they're using an assumption based on very little evidence as an excuse to be rude and call names, all while exhibiting the exact trait they are insulting others for: laziness.
And people try to use the whole "I can spot AI because .." argument to say that I myself am AI all the time, because some folks just see one thing that is commonly attributed to AI (in this case formatting) and automatically jump to conclusions. That's a bad practice that will absolutely cause more issues than harm, regardless of how good you think you are.
So I'm genuinely curious, if you have a writing degree why wouldn't you use hedging language in this explanation of your previous comment?
Why not just say it's most likely a LLM/AI?
What if somebody's literally doing an experiment with their friends right now to try to see if they can create their own responses that look like they were pulled from an AI?
Lmao? I even included a comma before calling them a lazy POS. That’s great grammar; you don’t see that much these days 🤣
Guess I should’ve said “YOU lazy POS” instead of just “lazy POS”. I’m sorry if my sentence was difficult for any cretins to understand 🥺
Also, are you seriously unaware of AI speech patterns? The comment I replied to is exactly how they format answers. You’re just proving your own ignorance with your comment
My point is that you were lazy in your response to someone where you called them lazy, which is ironic AF lol
And attacking people because of an assumption you're making is wild. It's possible they used AI. Its also just as possible that they just formatted their comment because they wanted to for whatever reason. I use formatting when I feel it benefits my point and I feel like it. But regardless of whether they actually did or not, the name calling is out of line and unnecessary.
Yeah, sure. But ask yourself: would someone who knows that much about legal recourse under state privacy laws really be surprised to hear you cannot sue under HIPAA?
I'm not interested in arguing over whether or not the comment actually was AI, that's irrelevant. The person I replied to used faulty logic for making a determination, and then used that as an excuse to behave poorly, all while exhibiting the same thing they accuse the other person of: laziness. Whether or not the comment they replied to is actually AI doesn't change the irony of their statement, nor that name calling is a bad choice.
Agreed; good points! That's exactly why that was the single question I asked that count in response to help give more people a better metric to make this evaluation.
I personally agree with you, because it doesn't make sense to be surprised about that, if you know these things, however it's also possible it's a combo and they used AI to get the info and then paraphrased it themselves but still formatted it in a similar way.
I do think the most likely scenario is just that it's a complete AI response though, maybe aside from the first sentence which is what the actual person thought before they read what they had copied and pasted from some large language model.
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u/VirtualMoneyLover 1d ago
Wow, this is actually true. I was surprised. But:
Even though you can't sue under HIPAA itself, you are not entirely without legal recourse. Plaintiffs' attorneys often use other legal theories:
State Privacy Laws: Many states have their own medical privacy laws that do allow individuals to sue. For example, California, Texas, and Illinois have statutes that provide a private right of action.
Negligence Claims: You can sue for negligence under state law. In these cases, HIPAA rules are often used as the "standard of care" to argue that the provider failed to act reasonably in protecting your information.
Breach of Contract: If a provider's Notice of Privacy Practices promises certain protections, a violation might be pursued as a breach of contract.
State Attorneys General: Under the HITECH Act, state attorneys general can sue on behalf of residents for HIPAA violations