Last month, an employee of MNsure, Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, accidentally sent an unencrypted email to the wrong person. The email contained the private information of over two thousand people, and went to a local insurance broker. The broker, Jim Koester, deleted the information, and later reported it, but the incident was a striking illustration of the insecurity of the Obamacare system. The data included names, addresses and Social Security numbers, as well as other information. As Koester told the Minnesota Star Tribune, “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident that their data is safe?” Though the majority of Americans were ideologically skeptical of Obamacare when it was initially passed, it has been developments in the past few months which have illustrated practical problems with the program’s implementation. Members of Congress and experts have been concerned for weeks about database integrity and design flaws, as well as the selection of employees trusted with the data. The incident also compounds concerns Obamacare critics have expressed since the beginning about the program’s data mining. As long as it’s stored at a state level, doctors are encouraged to ask very private information about individuals. The data does not only include identifiers such as name, address and SSN, but also income, citizenship status, tax information, family size, citizenship, health plan enrollment, incarceration status and even gun ownership.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 21:09:17 +0000