DeGette Opening Statement At Hearing On Security Of Healthcare.gov
November 19, 2013
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (CO-1) presided as Ranking Member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee's hearing on the security of Healthcare.gov.
Video of Rep. DeGette's opening statement can be found here.
Rep. DeGette's opening statement, as delivered, is below:
Thank you very much Chairman Murphy. I want to add your thanks to Mr. Chao for being here today, as well as our three contractor witnesses, MITRE, CCSI, and Foreground.
We must make sure that data on Healthcare.gov is secure. Everybody can agree on that.
The American people must know their data is protected when they go on the site to find a quality, affordable insurance plan for themselves or their families.
This is critical.
However, my fear is that today's hearing is actually less about the facts of the security of Healthcare.gov and more about political points and undermining the ACA.
Without a doubt, no would disagree there are troubling problems with the rollout of the ACA's exchanges.
Three weeks ago, our full Committee held the first hearing on the inexcusable fact that Healthcare.gov seems to have been broken since it was very first launched.
And three weeks later while improving it is clearly still not up to speed.
As I've said before – the exchanges need to be fixed, and they need to be fixed fast – so the American people can easily access quality, affordable insurance plans open to them.
I hope we'll have another hearing after the November 30th deadline to see how they are working.
My fear about this hearing today though is that it won't enlighten the American public, but instead raise unjustified fears about security piling on all of the other issues.
Obviously as I said, we need to make sure that data on Healthcare.gov is secure, but we should not create smoke if there is no fire.
So before we begin, I want to give the American people some peace of mind, based on the facts that we know about security on healthcare.gov:
First, and critically, no American has to provide any personal health information to Healthcare.gov or to insurers in order to qualify for health coverage and subsidies.
To make sure about this, I went on the exchange for myself the other day.
That's because the ACA bans discrimination based on preexisting health conditions.
Before the ACA became law, Americans buying coverage on the individual insurance market had to fill out page after page of personal health information to apply for insurance.
But no longer – thanks to the Affordable Care Act – Americans do not have to turn over any private health information to get coverage.
Second, while no website - in government or in the private sector - is 100% secure unfortunately, there is a complex and detailed set of rules that HHS must follow to ensure that data on Healthcare.gov is secure.
I am looking forward to hearing from you Mr. Chao about these security issues today.
The agency has had a long record of maintaining personal information - about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and many areas - and has never had a significant leak of information.
HHS must comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act, and National Institute of Standards and Technology Guidelines to protect information systems and the data collected or maintained by Healthcare.gov.
Like all federal agencies, HHS is required to develop, document, and implement an agency-wide information security program.
To date, our Committee's investigation has found that CMS has complied with every important security rule and guideline.
They hired a small army of contractors to make sure that the website is secure and they are going to talk to us about it today.
The memo, Mr. Chairman that you talked about at our last hearing identified some security concerns - primarily a lack of end-to-end testing for Healthcare.gov.
But it also outlined a mitigation plan; one we learned the agency was following to mitigate security risks.
So, I want to hear from the contractors and from you Mr. Chao if in fact these findings are being heeded.
Unfortunately, Mr. Chairman I have to raise one more issue in my remaining minute. That is this Committee's grand tradition of bipartisanship investigation.
Apparently, the Committee last Thursday received a memo from CMS Red Team discussion document.
The Majority on this Committee did not share this memo with the Minority on this Committee until yesterday. Coincidently, just after they leaked this memo to the Washington Post.
Now, and if you saw the Washington Post front page Today, you saw a big story - and Mr. Chairman you were quoted in that story - talking about concerns of the readiness of the exchange based on this memo.
I know that is not the topic of this hearing today, but I have to say it is not in the tradition of the Committee to conduct investigations that way.
When the Majority received this memo, it should have immediately provided it to all of the Members so we could read it and find out.
We are all just concerned about making these exchanges work.
To that end, Mr. Waxman and I have written a letter expressing our displeasure and we would like to enter that into the record at this time Mr. Chairman.
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