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Chinese Hackers Targeted Insurer To Learn About US Healthcare (engadget.com)

Posted by timothy on from the too-crazy-to-make-up dept.

hackingbear writes: When Anthem revealed a data breach that exposed the details of more than 80 million people, the incident raised a lot of questions: who would conduct such a hack against a health insurance firm? Investigators finally have some answers... and they're not quite what you'd expect. Reportedly, the culprits were Chinese hackers helping their nation understand how US medical care works. It may be part of a concerted campaign to get ready for 2020, when China plans to offer universal health care. Next, we should outsource politicians from China to fix our healthcare system.

9 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Good Luck with that by Crashmarik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Insurers exist to prevent people from understanding how healthcare works.

  2. Let me save you some trouble... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    " Reportedly, the culprits were Chinese hackers helping their nation understand how US medical care works. "

    If you're rich, you pay for your medical care out of pocket.

    If you're not rich, you pay for health insurance that doesnt cover anything and then you die.

    1. Re:Let me save you some trouble... by Gavagai80 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Obamacare has not made insurance more affordable, not even for "low paid working stiffs".

      It certainly has. I had to drop my catastrophic-only insurance coverage around 2008 because it was just too expensive even for the limited coverage. Now with the medicaid expansion I've got full socialized medicine.

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      This space intentionally left blank
    2. Re:Let me save you some trouble... by orlanz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Sorry it sucked for you. But I personally know two people that without Obamacare's exchanges, one would probably not be talking today, and the other would have moved to another country for the same medication and medical service but 1/5 the cost. Sorry, but prior to Obamacare, there were a lot of people like them who "just got by" because they weren't chronically sick to be taken in by emergency care, but were slowly wasting away because the healthcare market felt they were unprofitable.

      Obamacare is no where near perfect, but for gods sake, the US couldn't touch anything in Healthcare for over 3 decades! All those presidents and congressmen in that time were useless for the sick and needy of the US.

  3. Those hackers are still at work by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next, they're going to hack German restaurants to get some tasty recipes. I hear they're also hacking into Martin O'Malley's email to figure out how to run a great political campaign. And looking for dental information from the English. Etc.

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    Do you have ESP?
    1. Re:Those hackers are still at work by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, they hacked an American health insurance company to figure out how healthcare in American got so broken. They probably don't want to make the same mistakes.

  4. Very ambitious. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Insightful
    My colleagues are Masters and PhDs and they hack out C++ to solve Maxwell's equations for a living. These are people who got 790 verbal, 800 quant and 790 analysis in GRE. They solve London Times Cryptic cross word puzzles for fun. They made several valiant attempts and have given up whimpering incoherently about copay, coinsurance and out of pocket maxima. (See I even learnt from them plural of maximum is maxima ). Again, they/we did not try to understand the whole US Healthcare, just our employee health benefit plan, the flex spending account, and the deductible partly kicked in by our employer.

    The Chinese trying to understand our healthcare system? GOOD. LUCK. BTW if you do figure it out, please explain it to us, Much obliged.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  5. Re:Help by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They were trying to figure out how not to do it.

  6. Re:How embarrassing by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No we don't. That's just media propaganda.

    It's the damned truth. Look it up. It looks like you've been fed on a diet of too much talk radio propaganda yourself.

    We eliminate the cost of insurance premiums by getting rid of the ridiculous cost structure of health care in this country. There are dozens of countries who already do this just fine, and the people there live longer and healthier lives. This isn't rocket science.