by Anita Schnee, Attorney at Law
Here’s a question we got from a client: The other day at the community center, a woman asked me whether I was vaccinated. Wasn’t that a violation of HIPAA?
No. HIPAA (the “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act”) is a federal law that protects your private health information, but ordinary citizens can ask questions like that. HIPAA restricts only health-care providers like doctors, nurses, hospitals, insurance companies, and nursing homes from disclosing your protected health information. Private employers, for example, are within the law to ask employees about vaccination status and, with some exceptions, to require that they be vaccinated.
HIPAA protects your right to obtain your own medical information, but, apart from the health-care providers or insurers, ordinary citizens or businesses have the right to ask you about it. You may hear differently over social media and even, these days, from some elected officials. However, the general idea behind HIPAA is that you are the one to decide who gets access to your health information. So you have the right to choose whether to answer questions like the one the woman asked.
Keep in mind that the woman was probably trying to protect herself from the more-contagious coronavirus variant, and not necessarily to snoop into your private affairs. Just as you are free to decide whether to answer her, a member of the public is perfectly within her legal rights to ask, and to decide for herself about what she wants to do.
