Free Republic

Vermont isn’t the only state-run health-care exchange that has exposed a consumer’s private information; Cover Oregon, the Beaver State’s health-insurance exchange, has managed to do the same. Valarie Henderson, a 55-year-old from Salem, received other consumers’ information in the mail last week, including birth dates, income, and Social Security. She had sent in her own 19-page application roughly a month ago—the website, which has suffered a series of technical setbacks, doesn’t allow users to apply through an online portal, so consumers must attempt to submit a paper application through the mail or fax. On Wednesday, she received a packet from...

Full Title: RIGGING THE FUTURE: Obamacare Creates 50 New State Databases With No Function Beyond Gathering Potential Voter Information, Real or Fraudulent It was never just a health care “fix”: A series of precise, brilliant, secretive, and illegal decisions by Obamacare authors led to the creation of 50 unbeatable election tools — and to nothing else. As you read, try to identify a rational explanation besides malevolence. (This is Part One of a two-part article.) Since the passage of Obamacare, all fifty state Medicaid agencies have been forced to create a new standalone database that contains nothing besides the contact...

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Officials overseeing the Vermont Health Connect website confirmed Friday there was a security breach on the system last month in which one user got improper access to another user’s Social Security number and other data. A report from state to federal officials overseeing the health insurance exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act said a consumer reported the incident with the Vermont Health Connect website on Oct. 17. The consumer, whom officials would not identify, reported that he received in the mail — from an unnamed sender — a copy of his own application for...

WASHINGTON — On a sultry day in late August, a dozen staff members of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gathered at the agency’s Baltimore headquarters with managers from the major contractors building HealthCare.gov to review numerous problems with President’s Obama’s online health insurance initiative. The mood was grim. The prime contractor, CGI Federal, had long before concluded that the administration was blindly enamored of an unrealistic goal: creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. Knowing how long it would take to complete and test the software, the company’s...

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) issued the following statement regarding enrollment in health plans on the Exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act (ACA or "ObamaCare"): "The Exchanges destroy privacy. Once entered, your information becomes available to a myriad of government agencies. And there is no taking it back. Moreover, the Exchanges are susceptible to hacking by identity thieves and other criminals. Some sites posing as Exchange sites may not be ACA sites at all, just fronts for criminal operations. "Navigators and Assisters are not necessarily trustworthy. They have minimal training, and do not need to...

Remember Tony Trenkle?   “[CMS Chief Information Officer]Tony [Trenkle] made a decision that he was going to move to the private sector and that is what our COO announced yesterday,” said a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who refused to comment whether Trenkle had been pushed out due to frustrations over the agency’s online woes. Why was he pushed out? Initially he seemed to be a Scapegoat. But Administrations usually publicize Scapegoats -- after all, the whole point is to claim all the problems were due to the Scapegoat, and then ritually slaughter him to expiate one's...

CBS News has learned that the project manager in charge of building the federal health care website was apparently kept in the dark about serious failures in the website's security. Those failures could lead to identity theft among buying insurance. The project manager testified to congressional investigators behind closed doors, but CBS News has obtained the first look at a partial transcript of his testimony. Henry Chao, HealthCare.gov's chief project manager at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), gave nine hours of closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee in advance of this week's hearing. In excerpts CBS...

As NewsBusters has been reporting, CBS News has been one of the press outlets totally willing to expose the disaster that is the ObamaCare rollout. On Monday, Sharyl Attkisson did a fabulous report on the CBS Evening News revealing that “four days before the launch the government took an unusual step: it granted itself a waiver to launch the website with a level of uncertainty deemed as a high security risk” (video follows with transcript and commentary)...

The Department of Health and Human Service’s Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services allowed state Obamacare exchanges to launch at the beginning of October without having an independent security assessment completed, as required by OMB guidelines and federal law. A recently discovered document published by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), raises serious questions about the security and privacy of the state health insurance exchanges and further highlights the extent to which the Obama Administration skirted federal standards in order to launch the exchanges by October 1.

The health care website went down again Monday for an hour and a half, and no one is sure why. As HealthCare.gov was being developed, crucial tests to ensure the security and privacy of customer information fell behind schedule. CBS News analysis found that the deadline for final security plans slipped three times from May 6 to July 16. Security assessments to be finished June 7 slid to August 16 and then August 23. The final, required top-to-bottom security tests never got done. The House Oversight Committee released an Obama administration memo that shows four days before the launch, the...

Obamacare isn’t just a glitchy site, CBS News reports. It’s so badly put together that it’s hazardous to your Internet privacy. (Video at link.)

full title....CBS News: White House Granted Itself Waiver To Launch Obamacare Website ‘Deemed As High Security Risk’A memo the Obama administration turned over to the House Oversight Committee revealed that the White House granted itself a waiver to launch the faulty HealthCare.gov website with “a level of uncertainty.” The waiver was granted four days before the Oct. 1 launch of the Obamacare website, even though it was “deemed as a high (security) risk,” according to CBS News. CBS News reports tests to secure customer information privacy on the federal health exchange website fell behind schedule, with a required top-to-bottom security...

The confidence in their big-government agenda that the Obama administration daily instills in me is truly overwhelming. Via CBS News: --- As HealthCare.gov was being developed, crucial tests to ensure the security and privacy of customer information fell behind schedule. CBS News analysis found that the deadline for final security plans slipped three times from May 6 to July 16. Security assessments to be finished June 7 slid to August 16 and then August 23. The final, required top-to-bottom security tests never got done. The House Oversight Committee released an Obama administration memo that shows four days before the launch,...

An internal government memo, obtained by CNN today and written just days before the Obamacare website opened, warned of a "high" security risk because of a lack of testing of the website. "Due to system readiness issues, the (security control assessment) was only partly completed," said the memo from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "This constitutes a risk that must be accepted and mitigated to support the Marketplace Day 1 operations."

Today, on the CNN Money site, there is a terrific story about the problems surrounding the ObamaCare website. The story includes all kinds of new information from a host of experts, and most of the news is flat-out terrible: The half-billion dollar site needs to be rebuilt from scratch, the site has an unwieldy 500 million lines of computer code (it took just 500 thousand lines of code to send a rover to Mars), and that code is "riddled with security holes" that could result one of "the biggest breaches in American history[.]" These same experts do not think there...

A airman, leaving the air-force, attempted to signup for Obamacare. They asked for his Social Security Number and Birthdate (an ID Thieves Dream) on the website. But then it also asked for the complete bank Routing and Account number like at the bottom of a check (a real thieves dream). Luckily, he stopped just in time when he realized how vulnerable he would have been.

A provision in ObamaCare requiring medical providers to switch from paper patient charts to electronic records is intended to reduce costs and improve care. But privacy advocates fear the transition is too fast for security measures to keep pace. Daimon Geopfert -- a security and privacy expert with the McGladrey consulting group -- compares the situation to a group of banks with tunnels to the same vault. "The security of that master vault, in many cases, is as insecure as the least secure of those banks," he said.

Some state governments are willing to hire offshore IT service providers to work on healthcare IT projects under controversial contracts that don't bar use of temporary foreign labor, or workers on H-1B visas. Two multimillion-dollar government healthcare IT projects, one in Illinois and the other in the District of Columbia, illustrate what's going on. In Illinois, Cognizant was awarded a $74.1 million contract in June to upgrade the state's Medicaid systems to meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. In January, the District of Columbia (D.C. awards Obamacare IT work to offshore outsourcer)[snip} "Due...