Democrat Blasts GOP’s Obamacare Hearing: ‘I Will Not Yield to This Monkey Court’
Rather than focusing on the real problems plaguing HealthCare.gov, House Republicans sought to portray the website as an insecure portal that will endanger the privacy of American’s medical information during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing focusing on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The accusations led one Democratic lawmaker to label the hearing “a monkey court.”
In heated exchanges, Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Joe Barton (R-TX) pressed the contractors responsible for writing the code behind HealthCare.gov about why some of their employees had access to “the database servers storing the enrolling information,” and questioned source code informing users that they “have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting stored on this information system.”
“How in the world can this be HIPAA compliant when HIPAA is designed to protect the patient’s privacy and this explicitly says in order to continue you have to accept this condition that you have no privacy — no reasonable expectation of privacy?” Barton asked Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI, one of the firms that wrote the website. He was referring to The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the law that guarantees “federal protections for individually identifiable health information held by covered entities and their business associates and gives patients an array of rights with respect to that information.”
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