Remember when I warned you about the Obamacare navigators? The ones who are only required to have 20-30 hours of training before gaining access to unprecedented amounts of personal information? I know it is hard to imagine how this could go wrong, but somehow, the folks working in the Minnesota exchange found a way to screw it up. From The Daily Caller:
An employee of Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange, MNsure, sent an unencrypted file to the wrong person and left 2,400 people’s private information at the mercy of a nearby insurance agent. One exchange staffer’s simple mistake gave insurance broker Jim Koester access to an Excel document of Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal data for whole a list of insurance agents. Luckily for the 2,400, Koester was cooperative — and unnerved. “The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Koester told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?”
No doubt this is a preview of things to come in Arkansas. Next month, on October 1st, our ‘state-run’ exchange will open shop, declaring “open season on taxpayers,” as one Arkansas politician put it (even though we still don’t know how much an insurance plan on the exchange will cost). Will Arkansans have their personal information — including addresses and Social Security numbers — carelessly paraded around the internet by untrained, unqualified government bureaucrats? (Advance Arkansas Institute argued against establishing this wasteful and duplicative government bureaucracy earlier this year. Unfortunately, lawmakers proceeded to institute a state exchange. You can read their policy paper here. AAI also predicted that a state exchange would leave taxpayers vulnerable to identity theft.)
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