HIPAA (one P, two As) is chiefly for data portability between doctors; not privacy. HIPAA is not intended to and does not protect your medical information from insurers.
Sorry to hear about your daughter. That is really tough.
Sorry to hear about your daughter. That is really tough.
So if any of them or their business associates got the information and sold it that would be a violation. But if say Target figured it out because she was buying a lot more orange juice and lotion (true story, Target‘s ability to figure out who’s pregnant is legendary) and sold that into it would not be covered under HIPAA
There's a weird thing going on where everyone pronounces it as if it were spelled "hippa", and then everyone believes it must be spelled that way because of how it's pronounced.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to pronounce it in a way that's compatible with the spelling.
English has barely any words with "aa", so you can't differentiate the vowel in a normal way.
There's no standard way to exaggerate a vowel that would work either. The closest I can think of would be an extra-long pronunciation or sticking a glottal stop in to make it sound like two vowels, but those would both be confusing and sound too unlike a real word.
And no matter what you do it's going to sound like hippo.
Personally, I read it in my head as /hipɑːː/， with the artificially lengthened vowel that you note. But if you wanted to wear that down into a form that was easier to say, /hipɑ/ is still very distinct from /hɪpə/, and /haɪpɑ/ would be too.
I don't. But people aren't going to say out the letters for something that could be easily pronounced.
1. HIPAA can't be easily pronounced; it is obviously incompatible with the normal rules of English spelling.
2. People pronounce CIA letter by letter.
Most people don't seem to agree with you.
> People pronounce CIA letter by letter.
It's only three letters, it's hard to know what sound the C would make, and pronouncing an acronym with only one consonant is a bit iffy for clarity. Those are small factors but they add up.
HIPAA has the double A acting against pronouncing it, but everything else pushes toward pronouncing and not worrying about that part.
URL?
I can't keep this up, but I'm being limited more by my acronym vocabulary than by any tendency for people to avoid pronouncing them letter by letter.
>> HIPAA can't be easily pronounced
> Most people don't seem to agree with you.
This is how we started the thread, by observing that people have enormous problems spelling HIPAA because they believe the spelling should correspond to the pronunciation.
A precondition for this observation is that the spelling isn't being pronounced.
People who read HIPAA have no problem pronouncing it.
People who hear hɪpɑː sometimes have trouble spelling it, coming up with “HIPPA” instead of “HIPAA” (this often isn’t because it is the most natural read of the phonetics, but because they back-figure the acronym from the best-known focus of the law as “Health Insurance Privacy Protection Act” rather than “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act”.)
This is the second time you've claimed that people say /hɪpɑː/. But they don't.
Thus, there is no adding up to be done.
And I very occasionally hear people pronounce it, so it seems like URL is somewhat borderline.
Compared to URL, HIPAA is pretty close on effort to pronounce, and double the effort to say the letters.
It can be easily pronounced, it is easily pronounced, and its not at all incompatible with the “rules” of English spelling.
I mean, not a lot, but enough:
https://scrabble.merriam.com/words/with/aa
The most common pronunciation of “aa”, especially when its not in initial position, seems to be IPA ɑː
Which is how pretty much everyone in the field pronounces it in “HIPAA”.
> Which is how pretty much everyone in the field pronounces it in “HIPAA”.
Something's gone wrong. People in the field pronounce it /ə/, as in the second syllable of "comma". This is a fairly common pronunciation of "aa", but only as in "Isaac". It doesn't match Aaron, aardvark, baa, aah, argh, waah, bazaar, salaam, or Quaalude.
Your list mostly consists of words that cannot reasonably be said to exist in English. But of the real ones:
START / PALM [ɑ]: ah [spelling variable; attested in the list as 'aah'], argh [spelling variable; attested in the list as 'aargh', 'aarrgh', and 'aarrghh'], bazaar, aardvark, aardwolf. Also salaam, which is a foreign word that is common enough to have a conventional spelling. (So is "niqab", which appears on the list as "niqaab"...)
TRAP [æ]: baa, waah.
FACE [eɪ]: Quaalude, which is a proper noun. Why is it in a list of Scrabble words? Isaac and Aaron aren't there.