Copy and paste law
I was doing some research today and ran into a couple instances where part of one law was copied and pasted verbatim into another law. I suppose this is not uncommon, but I'm not a lawyer, so I don't have that much experience comparing laws. I do, however, consult for lawyers and have to look up laws from time to time.
Here's an example from California Health and Safety Code 1385.10 and the California Insurance Code 10181.10.
The former says
The health care service plan shall obtain a formal determination from a qualified statistician that the data provided pursuant to this subdivision have been deidentified so that the data do not identify or do not provide a reasonable basis from which to identify an individual. If the statistician is unable to determine that the data has been deidentified, the health care service plan shall not provide the data that cannot be deidentified to the large group purchaser. The statistician shall document the formal determination in writing and shall, upon request, provide the protocol used for deidentification to the department.
The latter says the same thing, replacing health care service plan" with health insurer."
The health insurer shall obtain a formal determination ... health insurer shall not provide the data ... for deidentification to the department.
I saved the former in a file cal1.txt and the latter in cal2.txt and verified that the files were the same, with a search and replace, using the following shell one-liner:
diff <(sed 's/care service plan/insurer/g' cal1.txt) cal2.txt
I ran into this because I often provide statistical determination of deidentification, though usually in the context of HIPAA rather than California safety or insurance codes.
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