Does Obamacare offer sufficient privacy protections or is it vulnerable to security breaches that would expose personal information?
The Obamacare healthcare exchanges are supposed to go live on October 1 for enrollment, but the secure federal data hub that can access the health records of millions of Americans is way behind schedule. And the network firewall still hasn’t been tested.
This web portal will contain a massive amount of individual personal information such as medical records and tax information that will be shared across many government agencies.
A report from the US Health and Human Services Department Inspector General suggests that the necessary privacy safeguards have yet to be implemented before the enrollment period begins. The Inspector General’s office did not conduct any actual beta tests of the system software to determine its potential vulnerabilities, however. “Effective security controls are necessary to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of system and its information,” the report indicated.
State-based healthcare exchanges or marketplaces (where they exist) and various federal agencies will use the hub to access health information to determine applicants’ eligibility for the Affordable Care Act.
He attributed the problems inherent in securing the massive government database to incompetence on the part of key government officials involved in the Obamacare implementation.
To give the system a green light, CMS apparently intends to conduct a 51-day security review in just 10 days.
Given the recent revelations about IRS and NSA abuse, are you confident that personal medical records privacy will be adequately protected and secured under Obamacare?