By DONNA CASSATA
Source: Yahoo News
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House
overwhelmingly passed a bill to impose new security requirements on
President Barack Obama's health care law as Republicans maintained an
election-year focus on the contentious program and its troubled rollout.
The vote Friday
was 291-122 for the measure that Republicans said would address
potential data breaches, though they offered no examples in which
personal data had been compromised through the government website. There
were 67 Democrats who joined with Republicans to back the measure.
he bill was the first of several
targeting "Obamacare" this year in the GOP-led House. Republicans see
the law's woes as paying political dividends in November's midterm
contests and vow to be relentless in highlighting what they consider a
disastrous law.
The administration opposes the bill, which stands no chance in the Democratic-led Senate.
Republicans
insisted the legislation was necessary to address potential problems,
pointing to last year's security breach at Target Corp. The nation's
second-largest retailer said Friday that personal information connected
to about 70 million customers through credit and debit card accounts had
been stolen in a pre-Christmas data breach.
"What
if Target had not bothered to tell anyone?" asked Rep. Joe Pitts,
R-Pa., who argued that the Health and Human Services Department's
promise to notify Americans of security breaches needed the force of
law.
The measure would require
the secretary of health and human services to notify an individual
within two business days of any security breach involving personal data
provided to the government during health care enrollment.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., spoke of "credible and documented fear" of the health care website.
Democrats
said there had been no security breaches at the health care website and
the bill was simply a Republican effort to scare Americans from signing
up for coverage with misinformation.
"They are trying to put fear into the public," said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.
In
fact, there was at least one breach last year. A North Carolina man
tried to log on to the website and got a South Carolina man's personal
information. The administration had to scramble to make a software fix.
Republicans
used debate on the bill to assail the health care law, using
oft-repeated criticism such as "train wreck" and disaster.
The
goal of the Affordable Care Act is to expand coverage to tens of
millions of Americans who lack insurance, to lower health care costs, to
increase access to preventive services and to eliminate some of the
pre-existing condition requirements that insurance companies have used
to deny coverage. The health care website HealthCare.gov got off to a
calamitous start on Oct. 1, followed quickly by widespread reports of
canceled policies and higher premiums.
To
date, more than 2 million Americans have signed up for coverage through
the federal marketplace covering 36 states and exchanges in 14 states.
At the same time, at least 4.7 million people who buy their own
insurance were told their policies would no longer be offered this year
because they failed to meet the standards of the law.
Republicans
who steadfastly opposed the law seized on Obama's proclamation —
repeated by many Democrats — that if you like your health care, you can
keep it, using the law as a political cudgel. The House voted more than
40 times last year to repeal, replace or undo parts of the law.
The
administration, in objecting to the measure, said it already has
implemented safeguards to secure personal information and notify
consumers if a breach occurs.
"When
consumers fill out their online marketplace applications, they can
trust that the information that they are providing is protected by
stringent security standards," the administration said in a statement
Thursday.
The House had
planned to vote on another bill that would require the administration to
report weekly on the number of visits to the government health care
website, the number of Americans who applied and the number of enrollees
by ZIP code, as well as other statistics. The administration has
opposed this measure, saying it has been providing information on
enrollments, and the added requirements would force it to hire new
staff.
The House will debate that bill next week.
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