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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

If it happened.

The story is in a tabloid, and that's such an insanely egregious breach of HIPAA that I'm a little skeptical that it played out exactly like that.

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Perhaps not exactly. But of all the tabloids, the NY Post has to be one of the most reputable.

I contend that all tabloids are disreputable.

Well technically tabloids are just newspapers of a certain size.

Right, there's a big difference between tabloids like The NY Post, "red tops" like The Sun, and supermarket tabloids like The National Enquirer.

Exactly. Putting the Post in the same basket as the National Enquirer is an insult to Alexander Hamilton.

There's no HIPAA breach in the publishing of the article unless the information is being provided by a covered entity or business associate. Most notably, patients can disclose anything they desire about themselves.

The patient claims the following in the article:

> [The doctor's office] posted my entire medical record, including notes about my mental health, my bills, my insurance info, my driver’s license, birth date and home address.

why do you blame the tabloid? The quote said "They posted my", so it looks likely that it was the woman who said it, no?

> why do you blame the tabloid?

Because a common tabloid tactic is posting technically true statements in a misleading manner.

For example, the woman's statement could apply to having introduced her medical records into the court transcripts, which would be entirely normal practice. The wording in the article leaves us thinking they uploaded her records and driver's license in a Yelp reply or something, but I think that's unlikely.

It's the responsibility of the journalist to ask follow-up questions that are necessary to resolve these kinds of ambiguity.

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