Hey, how about having a mascot for HIPAA so people can understand it better? We hear HIPAA referenced all the time on the news, but it's pretty complicated, and I'd venture to guess our eyes would glaze over pretty fast if someone tried to explain it all to us, so how about a mascot character to help us?
So the mascot would be the HIPAA Hippo, and animated cartoon hippo mascot who would tell us the different aspects of HIPAA through little vignettes, like HIPAA Hippo's friend is injured in a car crash, but due to HIPAA she cannot find out where her friend is, or even if her friend is alive, and so HIPAA Hippo would try to hack into the hospital records to find out what happened to her friend, but she'd get caught and go to jail.
(The previous paragraph is for the privacy of medical records part of HIPAA. And then there would be more of these types of little stories to illustrate what else HIPAA does, like HIPAA Hippo getting a job at a hospital and being buried in all the excess paperwork required under the law, etc. And it would be a series of episodic public service announcements, kind of like Schoolhouse Rock was, but because HIPAA is a healthcare-related law, the HIPAA Hippo PSAs would run during medical dramas like Grey's Anatomy, reruns of House and ER, etc.)
Of course another possibility would be the HIPAA Hippy, and as someone who has a natural distrust of the government, the HIPAA Hippy would be surprised to find out all the ways the government is actually helping to protect everyone with HIPAA. (But the HIPAA Hippy would be less believable as a mascot, as a hippy wouldn't be likely to work for "the man", man.)
