Lede theme: In these days of secret domestic surveillance by the intelligence community, rogue IRS officials and state tax agencies using private information for political purposes, and police electronically logging every license plate that passes by, the idea of the centralized Data Hub is making lawmakers and citizens nervous
Would you trust thousands of low-level Federal bureaucrats
and contractors with one-touch access to your private financial and medical
information? Under Obamacare you won’t have any choice.
As the Obamacare train-wreck begins to gather steam, there
is increasing concern in Congress over something called the Federal Data
Services Hub. The Data Hub is a comprehensive database of personal information
being established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to
implement the federally facilitated health insurance exchanges. The purpose of
the Data Hub, according to a June 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO)
report, is to provide “electronic, near real-time access to federal data”
and “access to state and third party data sources needed to verify
consumer-eligibility information.”
In these days of secret domestic
surveillance by the intelligence community, rogue IRS officials and state tax
agencies using private information for political purposes, and police
electronically logging every license plate that passes by, the idea of the
centralized Data Hub is making lawmakers and citizens nervous.
They certainly should be; the potential for abuse is
enormous. The massive, centralized database will include comprehensive personal
information such as income and financial data, family size, citizenship and immigration
status, incarceration status, social security numbers, and private health
information. It will compile dossiers based on information obtained from the
IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the
Veterans Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social
Security Administration, state Medicaid databases, and for some reason the
Peace Corps. The Data Hub will provide web-based, one-stop shopping for prying
into people’s personal affairs. . . . . .
Not to fear, HHS says, the Data Hub will be completely
secure. Really? Secure like all the information that has been made public in
the Wikileaks era? These days no government agency can realistically claim that
private information will be kept private, especially when it is being made so
accessible. Putting everyone’s personal information in once place only
simplifies the challenge for those looking to hack into the system.
However, the hacker threat is the least of the Data Hub
worries. The hub will be used on a daily basis by so-called Navigators, which
according to the GAO are “community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups, to
which exchanges award grants to provide fair and impartial public education”
and “refer consumers as appropriate for further assistance.” Thousands of such
people will have unfettered access to the Data Hub, but there are only sketchy
guidelines on how they will be hired, trained and monitored. Given the
slap-dash, incoherent way Obamacare is being implemented the prospect for
quality control is low. And the Obama administration’s track record of
sweetheart deals, no-bid, sole-source contracting and other means of rewarding
people with insider access means the Data Hub will be firmly in the hands of
trusted White House loyalists.
So if you think the IRS targeting Tea Party groups was bad,
just wait for the Obamacare Navigators to be unleashed. “Trust us,” the
administration says, no one will abuse the Data Hub. Sure, because that has
worked out so well in the past.
James S. Robbins is Deputy Editor of Rare and author
of Native
Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism, and the New American Identity. Follow
him on Twitter @James_Robbins
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