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A government computer system that interacts with HealthCare.gov was hacked earlier this month, compromising the sensitive personal data of some 75,000 people, officials said Friday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services made the announcement late in the afternoon ahead of a weekend, a time slot agencies often use to release unfavorable developments. Officials said the hacked system was shut down and technicians are working to restore it before sign-up season starts Nov. 1 for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. About 10 million people currently have private coverage under former President Barack Obama’s health care law. …

The Trump administration said Thursday night it is pulling back advertising to promote HealthCare.gov as open enrollment draws to a close for this year. The Health and Human Services Department said in a statement that the government has pulled back about $5 million in ads as part of an effort to cut costs. The statement said HHS has already spent more than $60 million to promote sign-ups this year under former President Barack Obama’s health care law. Former Obama officials immediately accused the new administration of “sabotage.” …

Senior Democrats pushed back Thursday against an undercover government probe of President Barack Obama’s health care law, saying it didn’t uncover any real fraud. Investigators for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office signed up 11 bogus beneficiaries for 2014 coverage then got HealthCare.gov to continue benefits this year for all but one. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said these were “fictitious cases” and the GAO investigators themselves admit the findings can’t be translated to the 10 million people getting subsidized coverage through the law’s health insurance markets. Wyden spoke at a Finance Committee hearing on the investigation. But GAO’s audits chief Seto...

Advertising websites have the ability to obtain a sizable chunk of personal data provided by users of Healthcare.gov. Following up on a January 20 Associated Press report, a congressional analysis confirmed that in many instances, personal data collected by Healthcare.gov is shared with companies like Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and Advertising.com. The type of information acquired by these companies includes age, income, zip code, use of tobacco, and pregnancy. …

Privacy advocates say the Obama administration needs to make more changes to protect consumer privacy on the government’s health insurance website. The administration reversed course Friday and scaled back the release of personal information from HealthCare.gov, after The Associated Press reported that such details as consumers’ income and tobacco use were going to private companies with a commercial interest in the data.The episode could become a blemish on what’s otherwise shaping up as a successful open enrollment season for the second year of expanded coverage under President Barack Obama’s health care law. Lawmakers continue to insist on a full explanation....

The Obama administration unveiled a new version of HealthCare.gov on Wednesday, with some improvements as well as at least one early mistake and a new challenge. Officials also said that HealthCare.gov won’t display premiums for 2015 until the second week of November. Open enrollment season runs Nov. 15 through Feb. 15. Coverage can start as early as Jan. 1. […] The goof is a mistranslation in large type on the home page of the Spanish-language version of the site. It’s the very first word on the page. Trying to translate “get ready,” someone came up with the wrong word in...

The U.S. Digital Service, comprised of a small team of digital experts, will collaborate with federal agencies to make websites more consumer friendly, to identify and fix problems and to help upgrade the government’s technology. Mikey Dickerson, the former Google engineer who helped fix HealthCare.gov after a disastrous launch will be the administrator of the U.S. Digital Service and deputy federal chief information officer. Specifically, the team will try to bring the government’s digital services in line with the private sector, collaborate with agencies to identify gaps in designing, developing and operating services and providing accountability at agencies. The administration...

On Monday, the White House announced a new organization designed to help spruce up government websites and (it hopes) prevent another HealthCare.gov debacle. Called the U.S. Digital Service, it will be tasked with modernizing the government's digital presence and revamping how the feds provide information and online services in ways that compare favorably with Amazon or Facebook.

A failure of management by the Obama administration led to the disastrous rollout of the ObamaCare website and caused the government to incur tens of millions in additional costs, according to a congressional watchdog report released Wednesday. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded after a months-long investigation into the rocky rollout of Healthcare.gov that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ failure to establish “effective planning or oversight practices” was to blame for website’s myriad problems after it was launched. Among the issues, investigators found that the administration kept changing the contractors' marching orders for the HealthCare.gov website, creating widespread...

Liberals wanted a national enrollment system under Obamacare. They might just get it. Right now, 36 states rely on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, to enroll people in health coverage. At least two more states are opting in next year, with a few others likely to follow. Only two states are trying to get out. That’s precisely the opposite of the Affordable Care Act’s original intent: 50 exchanges run by 50 states. The federal option was supposed to be a limited and temporary fallback. But a shift to a bigger, more permanent Washington-controlled system is instead underway — without preparation, funding...

HealthCare.gov will be out of service for two and a half days beginning on Feb. 15 — the last day people can sign up to obtain coverage that begins on March 1. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services announced in a blog post on Monday that the ObamaCare website would be lacking some enrollment functionalities so the Social Security Administration can conduct its annual systems maintenance activities. The site will be out of order from 3 p.m. on Feb. 15 until 5 a.m. on Tuesday — a period that coincides with the long holiday weekend. Those seeking coverage by...

Remember when John McAfee warned us in November that anybody who signed up to the Obamacare site might have their bank account cleaned-out by hackers? The eccentric genius and former fugitive called the government website 'a hacker's wet dream', adding that there were 'NO safeguards' that would stop someone from starting a fake Obamacare website 'for a couple hundred dollars' that could 'empty your bank account' in hours.  McAfee added unambiguously that 'It's going to happen, and it's going to happen soon... nothing in the Obamacare system safeguards against this.'  And I thought he was just trying to sell...

The man who appeared before Congress last week to explain the security pitfalls of HealthCare.gov took to Fox News on Sunday to explain just how easy it was to penetrate the website. Hacking expert David Kennedy told Fox’s Chris Wallace that gaining access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees via HealthCare.gov took about 4 minutes and required nothing more than a standard browser, the Daily Caller reported. “And 70,000 was just one of the numbers that I was able to go up to and I stopped after that,” he said. “You know, I’m sure it’s hundreds of thousands, if...

January 02, 2014, 12:54 pm 11 attorneys general slam Obama healthcare fixes as illegal By Rebecca Shabad Eleven GOP attorneys general say the Obama administration is breaking the law by repeatedly making changes to ObamaCare without going through Congress. The attorneys general specifically criticize President Obama's executive action that allowed insurance companies to keep offering health plans that had been canceled for not meeting ObamaCare's more rigorous standards. “We support allowing citizens to keep their health insurance coverage, but the only way to fix this problem-ridden law is to enact changes lawfully: through Congressional action,” the attorneys general wrote in...

Walgreen Co said on Monday it will provide a month´s supply of certain prescriptions at no upfront cost to U.S. participants who have not yet received a plan identification number under President Barack Obama´s signature healthcare law. The offering comes as U.S. government officials struggle to roll out the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Myriad enrollment problems have dogged the site´s website, HealthCare.gov, since its October launch and many insurance companies have said they are not getting accurate enrollee information to be able to process required forms. Walgreen, the largest drug store chain in the United States, said

Millions of consumers are flooding the online federal healthcare portal ahead of Tuesday’s deadline to purchase insurance that would be effective on Jan. 1, according to the Obama administration. The HealthCare.gov website set a record for Internet traffic on Monday, with nearly 2 million people visiting the site, and an additional quarter of a million phoning the call centers, according to the administration’s Twitter account.

According to the White House, President Obama tried to symbolically sign up for Obamacare but the system didn’t recognize him. Ed Henry at FOX News reported: “We learned today from the White House. Initially, they said he signed up for what they called a bronze plan, paying about four hundred dollars a month in premiums. But, then they came back to us and said – Wait, he didn’t actually enroll.

President Obama -- not exactly leading by example -- was finally signed up forObamacare in a symbolic move showing support for his own law. But, Fox News' Ed Henry reported Monday, the healthcare.gov system couldn't verify his identity, so his staff had to sign him up in person. The reason, Henry said, is that Obama's personal information is not in particular government data bases. "So healthcare.gov could not actually verify his identity, oddly enough," Henry said. So Obama himself did not sign up for healthcare. Instead, an official told Politico that his staff went to the D.C. exchange in person to sign...

HONOLULU — He won’t use it, and he didn’t actually sign up for it himself, but President Barack Obama has enrolled for health coverage through the new insurance exchanges. Announcing his enrollment Monday, the White House called it a symbolic show of Obama’s support for the fledgling exchanges where millions of Americans must buy insurance or face a penalty. Ironically, it also served as a reminder of just how complex and sometimes daunting the process can be. Obama, like so many other Americans, couldn’t use the website. “The complicated nature of the president’s case required an in-person sign-up,” the White...

As Oracle Corp. programmers try to fix problems with its work on the state's health insurance website, Cover Oregon is bringing in outside experts to make sure the company isn't adding new bugs at the same time. The exchange's interim director, Bruce Goldberg, said Monday he's hiring people with the skills to look at programming code as it is being written to ensure "it is done correctly and we don't have to continue to go back and fix bugs in the system." Goldberg's statement turns up the heat on Oracle and provides perhaps the most direct acknowledgement yet that the...