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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."
Obamacare is the biggest disaster that ever has hit the United States. You think fraud and abuse are rampant in Medicare/Medicaid? Just wait. You will see fraud and waste the likes of which have never been seen or contemplated before. Forcing successful people to pay for insurance for the dregs of society is just wrong. Vote this man out of office.
By the history of large government IT projects, this is pretty well normal. The DOD, IRS, and just about every large department has had anything from minor to major disasters when setting up or updating systems.
I think too much of this is due to government bidding requirements that put too much emphasis on who you know more than what you know. I have seen too many stories where competence is the last thing looked at for contractors.
Obama health care plan is less ambitious than the health care plan propose by Richard M Nixon in 1974. The political spectrum in the US is nowadays so far to the right that Richard Nixon looks like a communist compared to the 21st century democratic party.
"hacker steals the social security numbers and other information people provide when signing up for insurance."
Why would anyone provide a social security number to be used for medical purposes?
Obamacare failing doesn't serve anyone's interests. And it won't succeed. Its too poorly set up to do anything but fail.
So if you want socialized medicine... this will only make your idea appear stupid or your political allies too inept to execute such a plan.
If you don't want socialized medical care this will effectively give it to you anyway... but it will be even more expensive... badly run... and generally all the negatives will be more negative.
So lets not do this... kill it and restart the debate on it. Does that mean the supporters will have to ACTUALLY get support for their program this time instead of sneaking it through? Yes. But they should have done that in the first place and this is so screwed up in large part because they broke the rules.
I know what the supporters are going to say... that they followed the letter of the law. Possibly by the narrowest possible definition. But you know damn well that you broke the spirit of the law in half getting there.
That said, that isn't the point of my post. My point is that indifferent to all that, Obamacare is unfixable. It needs to be put down like a rabid dog and THEN we can evaluate what our options are after that. But causing American insurance premiums to double is not in any one's interest. Stop it.
If you care about the poor. Stop it.
If you care about jobs. Stop it.
If you care about the country. Stop it.
At this point, the only reason to support it is ego... aka fear of looking like a fool after investing so much political capital into the issue... or ignorance.
That's all that's left.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Hmm. I wonder who would pay the penalties for any security breaches. Hmm.
Why is it that I'm seeing half the stories on Slashdot, after they spent a day or two on Drudge Report? Especially ones that are only slightly "News for nerds" material?
Are that many /.ers closet Drudge readers?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
http://zoopedia.info/
social security number = ID and citizenship check
kill the bill with no replacement and sick kids may get cut off. AS well as others with Pre-Existing Conditions
What's even dumber is the concept of state-level exchanges.
A primary driver of high health-care costs is the balkanization of healthcare across states.
Allow the voluntary harmonization of various states' health care codes, which would in turn allow insurance providers to offer the same plan in several states. The 'health care exchanges' offered in the Obamacare bill would have been a perfect opportunity to allow capitalism to work to lower costs and increase competitive pressures - this plan merely ossifies the state-level segmentation of the marketplace.
-Styopa
Affordable health care, as the fine print in the approved rate sheet linked to from NY Governor Cuomo's press release reveals, can mean annual premium of as much as $35k for a family of 3 (for a 'platinum' plan). So, Congress was no doubt relieved to learn last week that they won't be eating their own health care dogfood after all â" the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has decided to allow the government to subsidize coverage for its employees on the exchanges. If you're curious, plug your numbers into California's insurance cost calculator to get an idea of how you might fare!"
I'm glad to see it's not working, but I'm disappointed to see that the end result will be the government continuing to implement something that doesn't really work. Being disappointed, though, is far from being surprised. That is something I definitely am not.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
some people think they have good plans and when they get sick they find out how bad they can be or they hit the cap and get kicked out.
If the exchanges are to be run by the states, why is the federal government responsible for their IT data security? The states want more flexibility and responsibility, let them manage that aspect on their own.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Obamacare is progress, and that's a good thing. There's too much money involved to suddenly shut down the private health "insurance" system. This is a good first step. After Obamacare, it'll be easy to eventually migrate everybody into Medicaid or Medicare, and it'll be finished.
I don't respond to AC's.
Honestly, I have never seen ONE Government IT or IS project that was not staffed by morons and run by bigger morons. Why the hell cant they hire people that have a clue? And on top of that hire people to manage it that have the balls and authority to tell any elected official to "DIAF" any time they suggest something stupid?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yet another reason to get rid of b. o. care!!! Or actually, obama don't care!!
social security number = ID and citizenship check
But it needs a proof of ID, or something like that, with a photo, I guess? Like a passport? Just the plain numbers are worthless, I hope?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
That, and fraudulent claims made using a valid SS number. Its a huge, not well hidden side of the medical industry now.
As for the untested security inherent in exposing this stuff to the net, security people will tell you, repeatedly, that a breech of security WILL happen, when there is money to be made by exploiting it, it WILL be done. Even RSA probably has less than 2 years of usefulness left according to one announcement here in the last couple days that its possible the two factor system will be cracked in 5 years or less.
Hell, just that announcement alone will triple the number of people working on breaking it, so 5 years is likely to be an extremely optimistic view of its remaining effectiveness, which is why I wrote the 2 above.
When its been broken, then the system is wide open & will have no choice but to go back to cash & carry instead of this mandated to be administered fraudulently NHC system the ACA has become in record time.
Security, I'm sure all can understand is like pouring concrete. The question has never been "will it crack" but when, because its a 100% sure bet that it will.
Let anyone who thinks its secure go right ahead & sign up, but please do not be surprised when an audit of services rendered to that SS# disclose that 2 years ago, you had both hips replaced, and last year a knee. Done in the middle of the night I guess because as far as you know, those joints are, like mine at 78YO, not in too good a shape, complaining mightily at times but are damned sure OEM so far.
And the only way you'll ever slow that sort of fraud down is to bring back short ropes & some of Willie Nelson's tall oak trees. IMO there must be a penalty for actions that harm another, strong enough to either deter, or prevent a recurrence if judged guilty by your peers.
Cheers, Gene
--
A pen in the hand of this President is more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law abiding citizens.
I and many other people are seriously thinking of witholding taxes, and makeing constitutional challanges across the board. Sorry Supreme Court, but if you guys would have gotten off your ass and did it right the first time, you wouldn't have this problem now.
Non-citizens can have SSNs. All they need is to be legally able to work or even just go to school here.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Many anonymous and modded up to +5 insightful with information that anyone who's followed the healthcare debate knows is false. I'm very dubious about the reasons this story was posted.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Vote this man out of office
He isn't allowed to run for this office again anyways. American voters have no choice but to vote him out of office in November 2016. There is no opportunity to vote him out at any time before then.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Speaking as someone who knows the coders actually working on the Exchanges, they are hilariously behind, and the pressure on the teams is incredible because of feature creep and attrition.
They're shifting people out of other projects to work on the Obamacare exchanges because everyone on that project is trying to get out of the project as fast as they can. When they stopped allowing transfers, the coders started leaving the consulting companies that are working on it.
By the way, there is no way in Hell that they will make their deadlines. They don't even have a chance.
Recommended
the Democrats did what they always do... they lied. They loudly proclaimed that the ONLY use the Social Security numbers would get was as a retirement account number and they said the Republicans (who fretted that these would effectively become citizen ID numbers) were liars. The Democrats even pointed out that they were making it illegal to use a SS# for anything else (and, again, called the Republicans liars for claiming that these restrictions would inevitably be removed). Of course, later when they wanted to make sure the government was getting all its tax money, the Dems changed the laws to require banks to use Social Security Numbers with bank accounts (since, after-all, everybody has a number... and they're unique... golly gee whiz... just like some sort of citizen ID number...) and now, all these years later, everybody in business and government wants your social security number and those numbers have become one of the easiest ways to ruin the financial life of each and every citizen. Oh, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government is under no legal obligation to pay you anything from your Social Security "account"
More recently, following the same basic play book, the Democrats also said "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan" and "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" and "your rates will go down"... and, oh yeah... they accused any Republican or Libertarian who labelled these claims false of being, you guessed it... a liar
Those who forget the past...
First, much of Europe disarmed and depended upon the US defending them (which fails completely if the US disarms and leaves them in the warm fuzzy arms of the Russian Bear...
Second, even after cannibalizing their defenses and trying to unite into the EU they are unable to sustain this... they have papered-over some of the problems with massive waves of cheap 3rd world immigrants (as some sectors of the US have also done) but unlike the US (importing mostly-Catholic mostly-Mexican immigrants) the Europeans have imported a wave of young Muslims from the middle east and their societies (and portions of their populations) are paying a price. Plus, even the wave of cheap immigrant workers are not fixing the financial and demographic issues... it turns out the economic laws, like physical laws, can sometimes be cheated briefly (and only apparently) but cannot actually be broken
Everybody cannot live in a hammock while somebody else pays the bills...The world simply does not work like six-year-olds and beauty pageant contestants think it does
We did not get out our guns and start eliminating as many dems as possible, as we were forced to do the last time the dems split the country in half over their desire to have stuff they had no moral right to have (in THAT case it was black slaves) ... this time they just want everybody else's time, money, privacy, and control over everybody else's healthcare (and thereby over their actual lives). Sure, I'm being snarky here... but WHERE is it written that Republicans must always help Democrats drag this country further and further away from its roots and priinciples and deeper and deeper into debt? Name just ONE time in the past 50 years when Democrats have compromised an ANY way that let Republicans drag the country further to the right (not the same thing as simply blocking dems from pulling even further left).
The big truth the left cannot face over Obamacare is that it not only IS a trainwreck, but Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi PLANNED it as one... they both rammed-through their dreams in the parts of congress they controlled by such massive majorities that they felt no need to even talk to any Republicans about it.... and they planned to sit behind closed doors to work-out the diffs and then pass the final monster bill....but just THEN they lost Ted Kennedy's seat in the senate to Senator Brown (which made it so any conference bill could only be passed in the Senate with some Republican input...something neither Pelosi not Reid would tolerate). The trio of Pelosi, Reid, and Obama decided to ram the existing crap sandwich through "as-is" without a conference and make it the law of the land. In other words: the Democrats KNEW it was complete CRAP but they rammed it through anyway because they were 100% AGAINST making ANY compromises with the Republicans.
The simple truth is this: Big bloated government is horribly inefficient and impersonal and does everything with blunt force... to big government, the only tool is the sledge hammer and the whole world looks like finishing nails. When you abandon EVERYTHING our founders warned us about and demand a gigantic nanny state that robs your neighbors to give you stuff, you are gonna end-up unhappy. The smallest government possible, with the lightest "footprint" possible, bolstered by friends, family, community, charities, plus a wide variety of voluntary foundations clubs and "societies" (things like the Shriners with their children's hospitals) are what our founders INTENDED us to have. Americans used to keep nearly every dollar they earned and they used to be able to afford doctors out-of-pocket (when I was a kid our family doctor made house calls... I still remember looking out the window one time while very sick and seeing him walking up the path tou our front door to treat me, and my lower-middle class parents paid cash for the visit... no lasting bills nor piles of forms)
Too many gullible young Americans have been indoctrinated by liberal teachers and professors into thinking the European models are some form of nirvana the US should emulate... but we are a HUGE nation and all our states are very different with different characteristics and needs, plus the founders of the US designed our government to NOT work... that's why we have all the "checks and balances"... to make it hard to make government work right even when we all agree and therefore IMPOSSIBLE to make work if ever a real tyrant came to power. Our very system is DESIGNED not to make something like Obamacare workable
you must look to Pre-Medicare and Pre-Medicaid for an honest "pre-Obamacare" comparison. After the government created Medicare and Medicaid, it started pretending to give lots of people "free" healthcare (which many loved because they got more than they were paying for) but it actually did this by a combination of [a] borrowing money that future generations must repay and [b] demanding docs and hospitals shift the costs over onto people with private health insurance. The obvios result is that over the past few decades, everybody not on medicaid and medicare was paying more and more for things (like $10 for an aspirin in the hospital) and the states intervened to make things worse by insisting on each regulating health insurance within their own borders and each state adding its own pile of odd requirements and costs... which in-turn drove insurance costs up and up while also encouraging insurance companies to dump people when they got sick (since getting sick meant becoming hyper-expensive).
If you want to hate the free markets, make sure you hate the free markets and not an already-screwed-up-by-big-government-interference not very free market
A "progressive" Republican (same wing of the GOP as Lindsey Grahm and John McCain). THAT wing of the party loves huge government every bit as much as Democrats do... it's just that THOSE guys wanna be the ones running it.
Nixon created the EPA, implement wage and price controls, hugged China and made arms deals with Russia that most conservatives at that time hated.
The GOP today is no further right than it was in 1960; it's actually waaaaaaaayy further left ... nixon was just at the left edge then, and even HE was not pro-abortion, or pro-gay, etc as some Republicans today (much further left) are. You simply cannot judge a party by one man. If you could, then I guess we could all agree that Mayor Filner or Congressman Weiner is the standard-bearer for the Democrats today, right?
bureaucrats with our health dollars...OBVIOUSLY better, right?
Note: Our taxes are going UP not down with Obamacare (which CBO now admits will cost TRILLIONS more than its advocates claimed while they were passing it... but I guess we needed to pass it first without reading it in order to know that...)
Oh, and our outcomes are actually far better when you adjust for a few important details. For example, most countries in Europe account for infant deaths very differently than we do and also tally other things like suicides differently. I remember having this discussion a couple decades back when a friend insisted Japan was going to eat America's lunch and they were becoming superior in every way, including in healthcare where they had "better outcomes for less money"... then came the investigative journalism that uncovered an interesting cultural twist in which it was admitted that cancer was a taboo subject there back then and so many elderly Japanese were never told by their doctors that they had it and instead sent home to die "naturally" of 'old age" (kinda like the AIDS denial in many places in the early 80's where lots of people died of "tuberculosis" and other things) which led to very few bad cancer procedure outcomes over there back then.
You have nailed it quite well!
Sometimes it takes an outsider with clear eyes to truly SEE
Welcome to our loud, weird, wonderful, diverse, very spread-out, rough-and-tumble, still somewhat-free country. You should''ve seen it in the 80's or the 60's!
Those states were supposed to each function as a competing laboratory; if California tried something and it worked, other states would go for it, but it it flopped then the rest of the nation was spared. If Arizona and Florida both came up with things that worked, a place like Ohio could grab the better model, or grab the best of both and try a third variant. Nationalizing things in the US has been a very bad trend that has reduced this effect more and more with the passing decades, sadly.
When Obama has your back , everything is going to be just fine. After all, it's not like he's a commie Marxist traitor or something.
I was not aware of that exchange framework, it looks like an odd idea to me. Health is not something I want to put in the invisible hand of free market, there are too many externalities for it to handle the thing properly.
Anytime you see people use some fucked up pun of a word to describe something they don't like, look at thier UID. I wish I had kept an actual tally but you can be almost certain it is a 6 digit UID or smaller. The smaller the UID the worse the comments get. The lone exception to this is Tom, one of our 3 digit guys from Germany I think. I don't think I have ever heard him say something stupid. So yeah, if you see Obummer, M$, sheeple, anything ending with a -ster like bankster or hipster, spooks (referring to spies), the term TLA, nutter, teabagger, oh god I could go on and on about it. Supposedly with age comes wisdom, but I have to disagree. With age comes some kind of paranoia and belief in conspiracy around every turn. Oh and the bastards are stingy as fuck. Not only do they not want to help a brotha out, but the fuckers won't even let you stand on thier lawn!
Wake Up America. Socialism is a precursor to Communism. Obamacare is about control NOT healthcare. Share this documentary : Grinding Down America: http://vimeo.com/63749370 with your Friends & Family. Vote the Democratic Socialist Party out of office 2014. See what Obama & his socialist party have planned for your family & America. You'll be appalled.