Legacy of Corruption: Crapcare emails deleted

[dario73]

http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/07/obama-official-deleted-obamacare-emails-sought-by-congress/#!


The administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) deleted some of her emails and may not be able to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the flawed Obamacare rollout, CMS has warned Congress.

Marilyn Tavenner, who was appointed by President Obama to take over CMS within the Department of Health and human Services in 2013 — prior to the Obamacare rollout — deleted some of her emails and did not save hard copies as the Federal Records Act requires her to do, MSNBC reported Thursday.

Though Tavenner’s computer did not crash like ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly did, Tavenner may be unable to cooperate with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoenas.

“During her entire tenure at CMS, Ms. Tavenner’s CMS email address, which is accessible to both colleagues and the public, has been subject to write-in campaigns involving thousands of emails from the public,” according to a letter CMS sent Wednesday to the National Archives and Records Administration. “Therefore, she receives an extremely high volume of emails that she manages daily. To keep an orderly email box and to stay within the agency’s email system capacity limits, the Administrator generally copied or forwarded emails to immediate staff for retention and retrieval, and did not maintain her own copies.”

CMS noted that this practice of not keeping emails “continued until November 2013,” just one month after the Obamacare website launched.

“It is possible that some emails may not be available to HHS,” the letter stated.



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/07/obama-official-deleted-obamacare-emails-sought-by-congress/#ixzz39oYIOGcJ

[dario73]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/384912/congress-isnt-alone-struggling-obtain-obamacare-records-jillian-kay-melchior?

Congress Isn’t Alone in Struggling to Obtain Obamacare Records

As news breaks about the Department of Health and Human Services’ missing HealthCare.gov e-mails, it’s pertinent to note how difficult it has been to obtain records in general about Obamacare, as I’ve learned personally over the past many months.

In Nevada, National Review had to sue the state health exchange before we were able to obtain records about how many Obamacare navigators had criminal backgrounds, despite the fact that they were handling consumers’ private information. (As it turned out, at least eight did.)

We faced similar struggles in California, where the health exchange employed some twisted logic to explain why it could not release the full records regarding navigators’ criminal backgrounds:

“All of these documents are nondisclosable because ‘the public interest served by not disclosing the record clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record,’” a lawyer for the insurance exchange wrote, citing California Government Code §6255. “Disclosing the names and criminal records of individuals applying to assist in Covered California’s push to enroll vast numbers in health insurance by March 31, 2014, is likely to discourage participation in this critical program and thus harm the people of California.”

In the end, we discovered that at least 43 convicted criminals were working as Obamacare navigators in California, including individuals who had committed serious financial crimes.

And those are the states where we even managed to get an answer. Though the state-by-state back-and-forth is a long story, we were denied public records even after appeal in the District of Columbia, and we’ve struggled to get clear answers elsewhere, too.

In Hawaii, the legislators saw it fit to totally exempt the health exchange from the state’s sunshine laws, creating what one reporter described to me as “a huge accountability problem.”

It’s not just records dealing with navigators, either. We recently filed several requests looking into the tech security of the state and federal health exchanges, and coaxing them to produce records has already proven difficult.

Then again, there’s a lot for the government to be embarrassed about. The limited records we have managed to obtain have revealed that a Romanian hacker was able to gain access to a Vermont health exchange development server for an entire month before detection; that a federal audit found “high and critical issues” in the New Mexico health exchange; and that Covered California had potentially jeopardized the personal information of at least 378 Obamacare enrollees.