[tel]

And, when it comes to the medical field, might even result in people dying.

No, it does with a great deal of certainty. HIPAA protects patient privacy, but often prohibits healthcare research, certainly increases the cost of health IT by orders of magnitude, and certainly destroys the opportunity to make good decisions about how to run a hospital or treat a patient.

The original plan was for the "P" in HIPAA to mean "Portability" but those parts of the bill were delayed and eventually dropped.