Americans are methodically dealing with the
Kübler-Ross stages of Obama-care grief, with our national healing
process moving briskly through roughly one stage per week: (1) denial
upon realizing that the website HealthCare.gov didn’t work; (2) anger at
the realization that the technical back-end of the exchanges is as
dysfunctional as the front-end of the site; (3) shock at the
cancellation of plans and increase of premiums; and (4) depression at
the prospect of losing access to doctors, too. We’re ready to move on to
the fifth stage: acceptance that privacy will also be a casualty of
HealthCare.gov.
Justin
Hadley was perhaps the first consumer to witness this breach. As was
reported by the Heritage Foundation, Hadley is a North Carolina resident
who used to buy his insurance from Blue Cross Blue Shield on the
individual market. In September, Blue Cross Blue Shield informed him
that, thanks to Obamacare, they were canceling his policy. Hadley went
to HealthCare.gov and was one of the lucky few able to register with the
system. He was rewarded when a letter popped up onscreen. The letter
was made out to someone else—one Thomas Dougall, of Elgin, South
Carolina—and it contained Dougall’s contact information and notes on
his and his family’s eligibility to buy insurance on the exchanges. When
Hadley reached out to Dougall to inform him of the mistake, Dougall was
shocked.
He shouldn’t have been. When members of Congress
questioned Kathleen Sebelius about privacy concerns last month, the
secretary of health and human services protested, “I would tell you we
are storing the minimum amount of data, because we think that’s very
important. The hub is not a data collector.”
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