Abbott: Health law navigators pose “serious threat” to privacy
By Robert T. Garrett
The Dallas Morning News
November 6, 2013
Attorney General Greg Abbott has cited about a half dozen shortcomings in federal rules governing the “navigators” hired under federal grants to help people sign up for insurance under Obamacare. The various “insufficiencies” mean Texas will have to issue its own, tougher regulations, Abbott said in a letter to Insurance Commissioner Julia Rathgeber on Tuesday.
Among the flaws Abbott says his and Rathgeber’s agencies have identified:
* Navigators should undergo criminal background checks before they’re hired, convicted felons should be rejected and navigators should have more training in the 1996 federal health privacy law known as HIPPA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. (The biggest recipient of the federal navigator grants in Texas, a 17-member consortium led by United Way of Tarrant County, has voluntarily done criminal background checks on all of the 75 navigators it hired and given them special training on HIPPA, officials said.)
* The federal manual for navigators gives short shrift to protecting consumers’ personal information from improper disclosures and fraud. Abbott says state insurance regulators “should consider establishing comprehensive requirements that govern how consumers’ personal information is collected, stored, transferred, and secured.”
* While the federal rules require reports of security breaches to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that isn’t enough. Navigators should be required to immediately notify the affected individuals and undergo more training on all the state and federal privacy laws and the steps they should follow in the event of such a breach.
Abbott does not mention one demand Gov. Rick Perry made this fall: Perry suggested the state Insurance Department require navigators to report to it the names of all consumers they help and where they helped the consumers. Experts said that would violate the federal rules, which forbid navigators from keeping names and personal information on the people they help.
Rathgeber has not moved to issue emergency regulations. As we reported in this Sept. 30 story, she must carefully navigate a new state law that requires her to try to work with the feds to iron out problems with the navigator rules. We had this story on Abbott’s letter in Wednesday’s print editions.
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