Minnesota insurance broker Jim Koester was looking for information about assisting with Obamacare implementation; instead, what landed in his inbox last month was a document filled with the names, Social Security numbers and other pieces of personal information belonging to his fellow Minnesotans.
In one of the first breaches of the new Obamacare online marketplaces, an employee of the Minnesota marketplace, called MNsure, accidentally emailed Koester a document containing personally identifying information for more than 2,400 insurance agents, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported. MNsure was able to quickly undo the damage because Koester cooperated with them, but the incident left him unnerved.
"The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was," Koester told the newspaper. "What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It's scary. If this is happening now, how can clients of MNsure be confident their data is safe?"
Online marketplaces like MNsure, called exchanges, are now running in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as part of the changes established under the Affordable Care Act. Open enrollment began on Tuesday, and as many as 7 million people are expected to sign up for private insurance plans on the exchanges in the next six months. Personal information for all of those customers will be routed from a federal datahub to the state-based exchanges, leaving people like Koester, and some health data experts, concerned about the program's security.
As more health-related data is digitized, "the privacy violations are going to be incalculable," Jim Pyles, an expert in health law who co-founded the law firm Powers Pyles Sutter & Verville, told CBSNews.com.
Health data breaches are far from just an Obamacare issue. Doctors, health administrators and their business associates already regularly handle personal information, like a patient's address, date of birth, Social Security number, prescription information and medical history.
Since 2009 -- when the Health and Human Services Department started requiring reporting on data breaches -- about 27 million people have been impacted by major breaches of unencrypted health data. For more, click link below....
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