Less than two months before enrollment begins for Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned on Monday that the Obama administration is unprepared to deal with “hackers and cyber criminals.”
In a letter, the Kentucky Republican called on the administration to “delay opening the exchanges until the Inspector General can guarantee the security of the exchanges,” arguing that the administration is “ill-prepared to guarantee the protection of personal data and taxpayer resources from hackers and cyber criminals.”
The letter came after a report made public last week by the Health and Human Services inspector general highlighted missed deadlines for assuring the security of the Federal Services Data Hub. If the security concerns aren’t fully addressed in time, the consequences could include identity theft due to stolen Social Security numbers, the inspector warned.
“Americans ought to be assured, at an absolute minimum, that their personal and financial data will be safe from data thieves,” McConnell wrote in the letter to Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner. “If you rush to go forward without adequate safeguards in place, any theft of personal information from constituents will be the result of your rush to implement a law to meet the agency’s political needs and not the operational needs of the people it is supposed to serve.”
It’s a shrewd move by McConnell, whose overarching goal, along with the rest of his party, is to disrupt implementation of the law and bring about its failure. Politically it helps his re-election effort against a conservative challenger by putting him on the front lines of the latest attack on Obamacare, which the base detests. GOP candidate Matt Bevin has been pounding McConnell for not doing enough to fight Obamacare in the upcoming battle to keep government open when funding expires at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
But more consequentially, even if McConnell fails to postpone the law’s rollout, the effort could damage Obamacare by scaring healthy Americans away from the marketplaces — an effort that wealthy conservative advocacy groups are already engaged in.
Despite the concerns raised by the inspector general’s report, HHS insists that the exchanges will be ready on time and intend to move forward as scheduled, saying it has “made substantial progress” on data security systems since the report was submitted in May. Enrollment begins Oct. 1 and the coverage takes effect on Jan. 1, 2014.
“We are on schedule and will be ready for the Marketplaces to open on October 1,” CMS spokesman Brian Cook said in an email. “CMS has extensive experience building and operating information technology systems that handle sensitive data. This experience comes from many years administering the Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP programs.”
But Obamacare’s sustainability largely hinges on whether enough young and healthy people sign up for insurance under the exchanges and defray the high costs of sick people who will be more motivated to take advantage of the coverage. Invoking security risks is likelier to scare away these people, who are less likely to benefit from the law in the near term, than those with illnesses who are in dire need of health care.
Photo by Shutterstock / Sergey Peterman
