If HIPAA is to be truly protective and useful, healthcare entities and their executives must be held accountable in the same way that Sarbanes-Oxley holds CEOs and CFOs responsible.

One conviction that netted $9,000 in penalties hardly seems worth an investment of over a third of a billion dollars. Without proper government agency oversight, it comes as little surprise that there has been only one HIPAA conviction.

any other healthcare providers or other entities.

Great physicians and nurses, skilled, caring and unparalleled in their training, intervened in my life and probably saved it. I was lucky but other Americans are not. It is time to speak again and stand again for the ideal that in the richest nation ever on this planet, it is wrong for 41 million Americans, most of them in working families, to worry at night and wake up in the morning without the basic protection of health insurance.

Fixing our healthcare system as a whole is our primary challenge, and to make it happen you need to get engaged – to pound the pavement, get your hands dirty, endure real sacrifice, take on antiquated thinking and help lead the public debate.

From a healthcare provider's viewpoint, bacterial meningitis is extremely difficult to detect and diagnose because the early symptoms, like a headache or fever, are not unique to this disease and thus there are no definite symptoms that say, 'this person is the one with meningitis.' That person can then be dead within 12 hours.