Welcome to the Hotel ObamaCare: You can enroll anytime you like, but you can never leave!
For those who have busted through glitches on the federal Obamacare insurance website to create an account, there’s no clear, obvious way for consumers to delete their accounts if they choose.
Once you finally make it into HealthCare.gov, it’s not clear how you get out.
For those who’ve busted through glitches on the federal Obamacare insurance website to create an account, there’s no clear, obvious way for consumers to delete the accounts if they choose — at least not in the current incarnation.
A POLITICO reporter used HealthCare.gov’s customer support chat to request that an account be removed, but the support agent said the request would have to be referred to an “advanced” customer service system.
The option to delete account information has become a staple of online services, from Facebook to Amazon. But HealthCare.gov isn’t a private-sector business transaction. And on the federal health insurance portal, people for at least the next few weeks will have to create a basic account even to browse health plan options. That doesn’t require all the personal and financial information that would be added to actually enroll in a health plan or seek government subsidies.
Obama administration officials declined to discuss specifics of any delete policy but a Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman did address privacy. “We take privacy concerns very seriously and have put in place measures to protect consumers’ personal information,” said HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters. “We have a long track record of working with sensitive information in programs like Medicare and Medicaid.”
Privacy and tech experts had mixed reactions to the “delete” gap.
Yes, they will keep it private to anyone OUTSIDE the government. But once you check into Obamacare, your data has been compiled with all the rest.
They stabbed it with their steely knives but they could not kill the beast.