It’s Henry Chao, who warned people back in March that he was “nervous” about the state of Healthcare.gov’s development and hoped that using the site wouldn’t be “a third-world experience.” Eight months later, that’s exactly what it is: The front end barely functions, the back end is a ripe target for thieves, and the people in charge are either dangerously ignorant about its operations or covering up what they knew. Money quote from CBS’s story about this:Chao said he was unaware of a Sept. 3 government memo written by another senior official at CMS. It found two high-risk issues, which are redacted for security reasons. The memo said “the threat and risk potential (to the system) is limitless.” The memo shows CMS gave deadlines of mid-2014 and early 2015 to address them…It was Chao who recommended it was safe to launch the website Oct. 1. When shown the security risk memo, Chao said, “I just want to say that I haven’t seen this before.”A Republican staff lawyer asked, “Do you find it surprising that you haven’t seen this before?”Chao replied, “Yeah … I mean, wouldn’t you be surprised if you were me?” He later added: “It is disturbing. I mean, I don’t deny that this is … a fairly nonstandard way” to proceed.
Note well: The estimated fix for the unspecified security problems was the middle of next year at the earliest. HHS says they rolled out the site on October 1 even though it wasn’t functioning because they thought they could fix it on the fly relatively quickly after launch. This memo proves that that’s a lie.
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