While indulging in the race-baiting the current administration is known for, Vice President Joke Biden barked at a black audience that Republicans are “going to put y’all back in chains.” In the Iron Age, chains were made of iron. This is the Information Age; chains are now made of information. A case in point is ObamaCare’s Federal Data Services Hub:
ZitatThe Data Hub is a comprehensive database of personal information being established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to implement the federally facilitated health insurance exchanges. The purpose of the Data Hub, according to a June 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is to provide “electronic, near real-time access to federal data” and “access to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer-eligibility information.” In these days of secret domestic surveillance by the intelligence community, rogue IRS officials and state tax agencies using private information for political purposes, and police electronically logging every license plate that passes by, the idea of the centralized Data Hub is making lawmakers and citizens nervous.
Nervous? They ought to be terrified.
ZitatThe massive, centralized database will include comprehensive personal information such as income and financial data, family size, citizenship and immigration status, incarceration status, social security numbers, and private health information. It will compile dossiers based on information obtained from the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social Security Administration, state Medicaid databases, and for some reason the Peace Corps. The Data Hub will provide web-based, one-stop shopping for prying into people’s personal affairs.
his should come in handy when inconvenient people need to be motivated to become more compliant. If they could make John Roberts reverse himself and issue a nonsensical opinion that destroyed his reputation to get ObamaCare certified as constitutional, think what they will be able to do with the secrets they will have on every American everywhere.
Who will have access to the Data Hub? Hackers, of course, but also uncountable hordes of power-hungry, ideologically deranged bureaucrats.
ZitatThe hub will be used on a daily basis by so-called Navigators, which according to the GAO are “community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups, to which exchanges award grants to provide fair and impartial public education” and “refer consumers as appropriate for further assistance.” Thousands of such people will have unfettered access to the Data Hub, but there are only sketchy guidelines on how they will be hired, trained and monitored. Given the slap-dash, incoherent way Obamacare is being implemented the prospect for quality control is low. And the Obama administration’s track record of sweetheart deals, no-bid, sole-source contracting and other means of rewarding people with insider access means the Data Hub will be firmly in the hands of trusted White House loyalists.
We are very quickly running out of opportunities to rebel against this. Once the chains are in place, they will get ever tighter — and ever harder to remove.
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
Print view
Mon Jul 22, 2013 1:03 pm
reply
