Obamacare Exchanges Months Behind In Testing IT Data Security

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a Reuters report: "The federal government is months behind in testing data security for the main pillar of Obamacare: allowing Americans to buy health insurance on state exchanges due to open by October 1. The missed deadlines have pushed the government's decision on whether information technology security is up to snuff to exactly one day before that crucial date, the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general said in a report. As a result, experts say, the exchanges might open with security flaws or, possibly but less likely, be delayed.'They've removed their margin for error,' said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. 'There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.' The most likely serious security breach would be identity theft, in which a hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance."

Comments

Re:What a clusterf**k.

[mwvdlee]

Please explain what is so different about the USA that Obamacare-like systems work in pretty much the entire civilized world except the USA.
Is the rest of the civilized world so incredibly brilliant, is the USA so incredibly retarted, or is it just you?

Re:What a clusterf**k.

[Trepidity]

Amusingly, despite the government=bureaucracy equation that many people seem to assume, one of the big benefits is how much less bureaucratic it is, too. When I moved from the US to Denmark, my health care got immensely simpler. In the US, I had to read tons of fine print to buy insurance in the first place; then fill out claim forms, separate ones for each provider (if you end up in a hospital you will be billed separately for the hospital bed, for the anesthesiologist, for the laboratory work, etc.), then lawyer about these on the phone as they were inevitably filled out incorrectly and various claims were denied until the second or third try.

Now everything Just Works and I don't have to fill out a damn piece of paper ever. Well, I had to fill out one: when I moved to the country I had to fill out an application for the health-insurance card. It took about 15 minutes, and came in the mail two days later.

Re:What a clusterf**k.

[Pino Grigio]

That's not true at all. We don't hear about it because a government body was set up under the last government with the remit to hide failures and prevent them coming to light, under the euphemism Care Quality Commission. The Commission has two jobs, (1) to cover up its own failings and (2) to cover up its own failings. It also occasionally provides cursory inspections of hospitals, failing to publish the truth about poor practice at any available opportunity.

The only reason we're hearing about it now is because of some very brave relatives. Also remember that UK FOI is much weaker than US FOI.