Now that the employee benefits provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been postponed, some lawmakers want the state-based insurance exchanges to delay their launch times as well if consumers' privacy is not protected.
Recently Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell drafted a letter that was sent to Marilyn Tavenner, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In it, the Kentucky senators indicated that there have been a variety of developments in recent weeks pertaining to security vulnerabilities.
"Last week, the Office of the Inspector General reported that the CMS has missed multiple deadlines for testing, reporting, and remediating data security risks in the Federal Data Services Hub," McConnell wrote. "In fact, [the Department of Health and Human Services] does not expect a final Security Control Assessment report from an independent testing organization until 10 days before the Hub is scheduled to begin operations, hardly enough time to fix any problems that may be identified."
Given these and other deadlines that have been missed, McConnell requested that Tavenner delay opening the exchanges until the inspector general could make the necessary security improvements.
In early August, Reuters reported that the federal government was behind in testing data security systems for the ACA. Experts believe that this could lead to states postponing the launch dates for the insurance marketplaces, which are scheduled to open on October 1.
