Why Medicaid expansion is not always a good thing

Here’s a story that should have received a bit more attention earlier this week, but since it involved a failure in Obamacare, evidently it wasn’t really news. But, if you’re one of those people who thinks that the answer to solving our health care problems in the United States is best addressed by putting millions of Americans onto Medicaid, read on further.

According to the Seattle Times, “almost 400,000 current and former members of the Community Health Plan (CHP) of Washington have had personal information, including Social Security numbers, exposed in a data breach. The nonprofit, which provides health insurance through Medicaid in Washington, is sending letters to 381,534 individualsWednesday notifying them of the invasion and steps they can take to protect themselves with help from Community Health Plan of Washington.”

In what can only qualify as a understatement, the director of the non-profit said “our members put our trust in us and this has been very upsetting to me personally.”

But no so upsetting that they would let the people affected know of the security breach right away, when the CHP officials found out about the problem on November 7. Instead the non-profit had to get its PR strategy – umm, security strategy – in place first, so the “organization waited until now to notify members…to allow time to hire a consumer security firm, line up translation services and set up a call center for anxious members to contact.”