Florida HIPAA Laws

• HIPAA ensures families have health care coverage when someone changes jobs.health image by Mykola Velychko from Fotolia.com
  
  The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that protects an individual's privacy with respect to personal health information. HIPAA, in effect, creates a national standard for health care administration and patient record retention and privacy. The Act also provides protections for workers and their families by securing health care insurance coverage for a worker and his family even when he leaves or changes jobs. Through HIPAA, anyone who leaves a job that provided health care coverage for one year or longer must be offered a COBRA group continuation health care coverage plan. Many states, such as Florida, have added state HIPAA eligibility requirements to the federal provisions for individuals seeking HIPAA insurance.
  
  

Florida HIPAA Requirements

• To be eligible for HIPAA insurance plans in Florida, you cannot currently have any other health insurance coverage, including COBRA coverage. You must also have been insured for the last 18 months through a creditable group plan, a government plan or a church plan, with no lapse in coverage of more than 63 days.
  
  

Ineligibility

• If your previous health care plan was terminated due to lack of payment, fraud or intentional misrepresentation, you are not eligible for any Florida HIPAA insurance. You are also not eligible under Medicare or Medicaid or through a conversion plan or group health plan. Individuals who have not yet exhausted their COBRA coverage are also not eligible for a Florida HIPAA insurance plan.
  
  

Other Considerations

• In addition to health care coverage, HIPAA also protects health care information and individual privacy. The federal HIPAA Act, in effect, created a national standard for handling patient records electronically. In response to HIPAA, Florida health care facilities and Florida health insurance companies adopted a uniform standard for requesting and disseminating patient health information. As a result, insurers do not have unique ways of processing claims as they did in the past. Now, insurers use standard, universal formats for processing claims and payments.