Watch: Democratic Congressman Slaps Down Republican Obamacare ‘Monkey Court’
This morning the Republican-led House committee on Energy and Commerce held an embarrassingly political grandstanding hearing designed to discredit Obamacare and to scare Americans from signing up for health care insurance trough the HealthCare.gov website.
Republican Congressmen were confrontational and regularly attacked representatives of the four top HealthCare.gov contractors who built the flawed website.
At times, they acted like attack dogs. They also exposed their sheer and utter ignorance of technology and disdain for research and facts.
Tea Party Republican Congressman Joe Barton of Texas, who in 2010 infamously attacked the Obama White House for making BP set up a fund to deal with the historic Gulf Oil Spill, quickly became a prime example of the GOP’s poorly-researched attempts to scare Americans.
Speaking (rather rudely) to Cheryl Campbell, the representative of CGI Federal, Barton pointed to a line in the source code of the HealthCare.gov website that reads, “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system.”
Rep. Barton then went on the attack, claiming that the statement is not “HIPPA compliant,” a reference to the 1996 federal law guarding patients’ privacy.
“How in the world can this be HIPAA compliant,” Rep. Barton asked, “when HIPAA is designed to protect the patient’s privacy and this explicitly says in order to continue you have to accept this condition that you have no privacy — no reasonable expectation of privacy?”
Barton continued.
“You told Rep. Blackburn that [the site] was HIPAA compliant. You know that’s not HIPAA compliant. You admit that you knew [that language] was in there. … You’re telling every American that you sign up with this or even attempt to, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. that is a direct contradiction to HIPAA and you know it. yes or no?”
Campbell replied, “That is a CMS call. That is not a contractor call.”
CMS is Centers for Medicare and Medicaid which is responsible for the implementation of the HealthCare.gov website.
“To break the law? You’re now saying that CMS made a decision to break the law, do you agree with in a decision?”
Of course, low-information Congressman Barton is dead wrong, and it took Democratic Congressman Frank Pallone of New Jersey to let him know — in a spectacular demonstration.
“I started out in my opening statement saying there was no legitimacy to this hearing and the last line of the questioning certainly confirms is that,” Pallone began.
“HIPAA only applies when there’s health information being provided. That’s not in play here today. No health information is required in the application process. And why is that? Because pre-existing conditions don’t matter! So once again, here we have my Republican colleagues trying to scare everybody —”
Barton wasn’t having it, and broke decorum by interrupting Pallone.
“If the gentleman will yield?”
“No, I will not yield to this monkey court or whatever,” Pallone exclaimed.
Watch:
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Philip Bump at The Atlantic explains just exactly how wrong Rep. Barton was.
There are several ways in which Barton’s analysis is incorrect. The first is that Barton says the language is “hidden” — because it’s in the source code. “Source code,” for those who don’t know, is the tagged language that tells a browser how to display a website. It’s “hidden” only because it’s information about the web page, not the content of the page itself. Meaning it doesn’t show up on the page, meaning that there’s no way it could even be legally enforceable.
Not only that, but the language, as detailed by the conservative Weekly Standard, is itself commented out. Developers will occasionally put marks around lines of code telling the computer, in essence, “ignore this.” (Why? Often developers will leave notes like “// Section two begins here” to make code easier to scan.) In this case, the language was likely commented out because the document, a fairly standard “Terms and Conditions” page, was repurposed form another project. Take standard legal language, comment out the parts you won’t use, and done. (Update: Expert Clay Johnson suggests that this is exactly what happened.)
Barton is also confusing two types of privacy: the privacy afforded under HIPAA (discussed below) and the privacy that is necessary for online communication. Earlier this year, Google came under fire when it was reported that its attorneys argued that GMail users didn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy. As The Verge pointed out, this is a fairly common legal stipulation that allows online companies to process information submitted online. When you send your emails to Google, you acknowledge that Google has a right to see who sent the message and where it’s going, and so on. It would be hard to maintain that information privately and have your email get to its destination! The language commented out in the source code of one page of Healthcare.gov is almost certainly similar in its intent. The witness from CGI Federal mentioned none of this.
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Video and transcript via The Atlantic
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