The Clinton administration proposed broad new privacy protections for medical records, with exceptions only for law enforcement, public health and medical research; in most cases, health records could not be used without a patient's consent unless it was for a health purpose. It would be a federal crime to disclose or use information improperly. Under these recommendations, a hospital could not sell the names of new mothers to baby food companies, and insurance companies could not release names of healthy patients to their life insurance divisions.
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