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The House Oversight Committee's top Democrat is accusing Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) of deliberately stoking fears about HealthCare.gov with partial and misleading document releases. Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.) cried foul on Issa's habit of withholding portions of documents about ObamaCare and charged the committee chairman with "cherry-picking" evidence to heighten concerns about the enrollment website. "The chairman's actions are a reckless and transparent attempt to frighten Americans away from the HeathCare.gov website and deny them health insurance to which they are entitled," Cummings wrote in a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Cummings disputed Issa's recent allegation that users' personal...

... In a tongue-in-cheek fashion, I was merely carrying on a long-standing tradition over centuries of false automata, mechanical devices that appear to act with skill and intelligence but that, in fact, are actually being operated by humans behind the scenes. The most famous of these is the Turk (pictured above), a device built in the late 1700s that appeared to play a very good game of chess against humans. In truth, a human chess player was ensconced within the device’s cabinet with the ability to perceive the current state of the board. Note that the Turk himself was a...

The bureaucracy tasked with Obamacare implementation may be violating a law that requires government agencies to keep private information safe. Under the the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the Department of Health and Human Services’ Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is required to have an “Authority to Operate,” or ATO. In order to receive an ATO, new information tech systems must perform a set of tests, including “Security Control Assessments” (SCA). But according to CMS’s 2014 budget request, no such security assessment took place. The Federal Healthcare Marketplace website was rolled out without full end­-to­-end testing. Indeed,...

MIAMI — After two months of false starts, error messages and pleas for patience from the once-hobbled federal online health care exchange, Karen Egozi, the chief executive of the Epilepsy Foundation of Florida, watched on Monday as counselors navigated the website’s pages with relative ease. Click. Next page. Click. Next page. The website, HealthCare.gov, was working so well that Ms. Egozi, who oversees the 45 navigators in eight locations who help consumers enroll in health plans, said her team gave the system an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, meaning that most people got as far as selecting...

Multiple state-run health-care exchanges are vulnerable to a type of Wi-Fi attack that can allow hackers to intercept usernames and passwords, KSTP, a Minnesota ABC affiliate, reports. According to Mark Lanterman, the CEO and chief technology officer of Computer Forensic Services who ran the simulated attack for KSTP, state-run exchanges in Minnesota, Hawaii, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, Maryland, and the District of Columbia are vulnerable to it.

When Ted Cruz suggested that “Nigerian email scammers” built the Obamacare websites, the Nigerian Ambassador demanded he apologize. However: New problems emerged on Friday, with a Capitol Hill source drawing attention to an apparent scam in the system. The source detailed how, after telling the user the password was incorrect, the site directed the individual to a “forgot password” page — which then asked for highly personal information. “On that page I was asked for my check card number and my ATM pin,” the source said. “I was fairly confident this was a scam so I called customer service. After...

"....... question is whether insurance companies believe in the website enough to put their advertising money where their mouthpieces were before its launch on October 1. “The big tell of if/when people finally believe it’s working is when you see the states, insurance companies, etc., restart their ad buys and outreach programs that they put on hold to drive people to the site,” a Democratic observer of health-care issues told NBC’s First Read. “Once it’s established that you can go from typing in the words ‘HealthCare.gov’ to getting a confirming e-mail saying you’re covered with reasonable ease, then I think...

There are many reason I don’t like Obamacare, including its punitive impact on taxpayers and the way it takes our healthcare system even further from a market-based approach. But now I’m increasingly worried Obamacare also is creating a playground for hackers and identity thieves – and the rest of us will be the victims. Simply stated, the results probably won’t be very pretty when you mix together these two items. 1) Typical government incompetence. 2) Massive data collection by government. I pontificate on these issues in an interview with Neil Cavuto. Dan Mitchell Discussing How the IRS and Obamacare May...

Cyber security experts told Congress today that the Obama administration should take Healthcare.gov offline until privacy vulnerabilities are addressed and detection capabilities are improved. David Kennedy, a so-called “white hat hacker” who tests security flaws by hacking online systems to help identify weaknesses, warned that there are critical flaws and exposures “currently on the website that hackers could use to extract sensitive information.” “The purpose of security isn’t to say, ‘Hey, we’re 100 percent impenetrable all the time,’ but can we detect the hackers in the very early stages of the life cycle of the attack, monitor that, and prevent...

Rep. Mike Rogers provides a cheery thought on personal security as the White House gears up to sell ObamaCare all over again. Last night, he told Greta van Susteren that data security on Healthcare.gov didn’t even meet “minimal standards” for the industry. In terms of the “private-sector velocity and efficiency” claimed by the Obama administration over the last couple of days, Rogers says that experts warned him that they would be sued out of business if they rolled out a website with this many security gaps. It’s so bad, Rogers warns, that the White House refused to brief Congress on...

It could take a year to secure the risk of "high exposures" of personal information on the federal Obamacare online exchange, a cybersecurity expert told CNBC on Monday. "When you develop a website, you develop it with security in mind. And it doesn't appear to have happened this time," said David Kennedy, a so-called "white hat" hacker who tests online security by breaching websites. He testified on Capitol Hill about the flaws of HealthCare.gov last week. "It's really hard to go back and fix the security around it because security wasn't built into it," said Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec....

According to Fox News Sunday, the new Healthcare.gov site has not quite achieved the promised “fully functional” status by the November 30th deadline. In fact, the site still can’t verify identities for potential enrollees, which means that consumers can’t be sure they’re seeing the right information for coverage options. After forty-two months of development and nine weeks of futility and failure, this isn’t exactly a confidence-builder (via The Weekly Standard): CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “Federal officials promised that healthcare.gov would work smoothly for a vast majority of users starting today. But that has not been the case so...

Obama administration officials said Saturday they were "on track" to have the problematic ObamaCare website running smoothly by their self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline. "With the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users," Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News, in a statement. Administration officials have since announcing the deadline qualified expectations and outcomes by repeatedly saying the site would work for the “vast majority of people.” The Washington Post earlier Saturday reported the administration was prepared to...

Well, I guess it beats explaining why the Obama administration failed to meet yet another of its deadlines in getting a 42-month web-portal project to work. According to the Washington Post, the White House will announce tomorrow that the Healthcare.gov site has been fixed, even though the site won’t actually be fixed — not even by the administration’s own metrics: Administration officials are preparing to announce Sunday that they have met their Saturday deadline for improving HealthCare.gov, according to government officials, in part by expanding the site’s capacity so that it can handle 50,000 users at once. But they have...

HealthCare.gov, the problem-plagued federal online site for signing up for insurance under Obamacare, will go down for extended maintenance on Friday night and overnight ahead of Saturday's deadline to have it working for most people, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said. The overnight maintenance overnight is set to last from 9 p.m. ET Friday until 8 a.m. ET Saturday. It's not the first time the website has gone done; the administration has frequently done regular weekend maintenance, usually on Sunday mornings from 1 a.m ET to 5 a.m. ET. During the maintenance checks, the website's application and enrollment...

One of the aspects of Obamacare that everyone seems to have forgotten at the moment is their effort to put everyone’s personal information, medical and otherwise, into a central database. With this system in place, you can kiss your HIPPA privacy goodbye. Last week, we heard from our youngest daughter that she was receiving doctor’s bills from a doctor she’s never seen. Some of the bills were from visits earlier this year and because they have not been paid, her credit score has been dinged. When she checked into it, she found out that the doctor’s office had her birthdate,...

Oregon once led the country in implementing Obamacare. Now it’s just about dead last. Not one person has yet enrolled in the Cover Oregon insurance exchange — a major embarrassment to state policymakers who early on had wholeheartedly embraced the Affordable Care Act even as other states tried their best to hinder it. After repeatedly delaying its website’s enrollment feature because of technical problems, exchange officials are still scrambling. Gov. John Kitzhaber announced new efforts Friday toward that goal, but mid-December is the soonest officials expect online enrollment could be available, and even that date is in doubt. Until then,...

Despite assurances that private information is protected, some staffers worried about where the data they share to create an account on the exchange is being sent. Officials assured them all security and privacy protocol are followed and that Congress’ data is not being sent out to a federal data hub. One week into the open-enrollment period, Senate staffers are grappling with glitches on the DC Health Link website. “I have one of 54 staffers who’ve actually even been able to get to the point of setting up an account. They keep getting error messages,” one woman said, when handed the...

An employee for Minnesota's new online health insurance exchange accidentally released confidential information on hundreds of insurance agents. MNsure officials say the employee sent an email to an Apple Valley insurance broker's office Thursday that contained Social Security numbers, addresses and other private information of more than 2,400 insurance agents. An MNsure security manager called the insurance broker, Jim Koester, and had him delete the file from his computer hard drive. Koester tells the Star Tribune the incident raises questions about the security of MNsure client information. Users of the exchange will need to provide confidential information to a federal...

Oregon, a state that fully embraced the Affordable Care Act, is enduring one of the rockiest rollouts of President Back Obama's signature health care law, with an inoperative online exchange that has yet to enroll a single subscriber, requiring thousands to apply on paper instead. Unlike most other states, Oregon set an ambitious course to make its insurance exchange, dubbed Cover Oregon, an "all-in-one" website for every individual seeking health coverage, including those who are eligible for Medicaid. But instead of serving as a national model, Oregon's experience has emerged as a cautionary tale, inviting comparisons to technical glitches that...