House Oversight Chairman Darrell “Witch Hunt” Issa has leaked another supposedly damning bit of information on Obamacare and, like the last leak, this one is just as bogus.
Last week Darrell Issa appeared on Fox News and claimed that healthcare dot gov was only able to handle 1,100 concurrent users when it launched on October 1st, but that turned out to be a lie.
On Monday of this week Darrell Issa leaked a report that Henry Chao, the deputy chief information officer and deputy director of the Office of Information Services at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), was “disturbed” by a security hole in the federal exchange.
There’s just two problems with that.
But Democratic committee staff pointed out that the memo talks about two specific systems: the “Qualified Health Plans (QHP) and Dental modules.” CMS told the Oversight Committee that the relevant parts of those programs will not be online until the spring, meaning they actually pose no security risk now, Democrats said. On top of that, the systems flagged as potentially posing a risk will be used by insurance companies and will not transmit people’s personal information, they said.
This is equivalent to House Republicans pulling up website code and quoting comments in the code (which are left behind by coders to annotate or highlight certain parts of it) as evidence of a security flaw.
Of course at this point Darrell Issa need not expend the effort to get it right. Because even if he’s wrong, his phony leaks will become part of an overarching, pervasive media narrative that Obamacare is now the failure to end all failures, overlooking the hundreds of thousands of people who are now covered thanks to the expansion of Medicaid.
But who cares about The Poors, right?
Update… as Media Matters points out, CBS carried Issa’s latest leak. Because the epic 60 Minutes fail on Benghazi wasn’t enough.