Hey, did you sign up an account in the California Obamacare exchanges? If you did, guess what: Covered California gave out your personal information to brokers, the better for them to call you up out of the blue and try to sell you an insurance policy!
Isn’t that nice of Covered California?
Raising concerns about consumer privacy, California’s health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn’t ask to be contacted.
[snip]
Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, acknowledged that these consumers did not ask to be contacted by the state or its certified insurance agents. But he said the outreach program still complies with privacy laws and it was reviewed by the exchange’s legal counsel.
Yeah, tell that to both individual consumers AND the insurance industry. The former generally does not like the idea that a website, group, organization, or government entity might feel comfortable at having personal information being given out to private third parties without prior consent. And it doesn’t really matter whether somebody else might feel differently, or whether they might feel differently if they only had all the facts. Folks get twitchy automatically when it comes to privacy; a smart government entity takes that into account, and designs the system to be opt-in, rather than opt-out.
Continue reading Covered California’s war on privacy. #obamacare