South Carolina doctors vow to continue HIPAA fight

Physicians say regulations are another unfunded mandate that puts a financial strain on their small businesses.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. Sept. 23/30, 2002.

Physicians nationwide hoping that a lawsuit filed in federal court would shield them from what they view as cumbersome privacy regulations are out of luck for now. But doctors involved in the suit vowed to continue their legal fight against the new rules, which physicians will have to comply with by next spring.

In August, U.S. District Court Judge Terry L. Wooten in Columbia, S.C., ruled that there were no grounds to wage a constitutional challenge to regulations that the Dept. of Health and Human Services penned after Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in 1996.

The South Carolina Medical Assn. and others will appeal a federal court's decision to toss out the lawsuit they filed in an effort to stop the government from enforcing the health privacy regulations.

SCMA, Physicians Care Network (a statewide health care network formed by SCMA) and individual physicians sued HHS over the privacy rules in July 2001. The groups made three main claims: that Congress had unlawfully delegated its legislative power; that HHS had exceeded its authority by including certain items in the HIPAA privacy regulations; and that the vague regulations with criminal penalties violated the Constitution's Fifth Amendment due process clause.

The groups will ask a higher court to look at these arguments, which Wooten rejected.

"We owe it to our physicians and our members to try," said R. Duren Johnson Jr., MD, SCMA president. HIPAA is "another big bureaucratic morass. It is another unfunded mandate." [...]