EDITORIAL: Obama’s bucket of worms

More agents coming to plunder the privacy of everyone

Obamacare is the gift that just keeps on giving — to its growing chorus of critics. President Obama blames the Republicans for trying to “gum up the works,” but the “gum in the works” is the Juicy Fruit peeled on the morning after from his own bedpost.

The president understands just how dreadfully complicated his health care plan is; he always has. He thought his golden tongue would carry the day. The White House is adding another layer of bureaucracy to make the impossible work. The latest are the “navigators,” government agents to help everyone through the maze of paperwork before an aspirin is dispensed.

Now 13 state attorneys general have written to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Health and Human Services, who will be in charge of the navigators, asking her to pay more attention to privacy issues. (Why give the NSA more snooping duties?)

Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida, notes that Mrs. Sebelius is so hard up for navigators that she’s taking people off the streets, dispensing with background checks and even fingerprints, and turning them loose to poke through the intimate details of a taxpayer’s life.

“And it’s more than navigators,” Ms. Bondi says. “It’s people to assist the navigators. These navigators will have the consumers’ most personal and private information — tax-return information, Social Security information. And our biggest fear, of course, is identity theft. What if [navigators] have been convicted of committing identity theft or grand theft? [Such a recruit] could potentially still become a navigator.”

These are legitimate concerns, and you don’t have to be a Republican, a conservative, a churl or a racist — the usual suspects in Obamaland — to ask questions about the botch that the bunglers and bumblers at the White House are making of everything they touch. Mr. Obama.

Via: Washington Times

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