When Kathleen Sebelius testified at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, she acknowledged the presence of a worrisome statement included in the source code of Healthcare.gov and promised that work was already underway to remove it. A search of one portion of the code later on Wednesday revealed that the revision was at least partially complete. The “no reasonable expectation” statement is gone from a large section of code where it had previously appeared. Repeated attempts on Wednesday to verify that the code had been revised on the specific page where users are asked to accept the privacy policy were unsuccessful due to a system outage at Healthcare.gov for much of the day. However, Thursday morning, a successful logon revealed the statement has been removed there as well:
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As we first reported two weeks ago:
Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas) confronted Cheryl Campbell, senior vice president of CGI Federal Inc., one of the main contractors responsible for coding the site, about the language last week and she declined to take responsibility for including it, but said that it was a matter for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to address. Wednesday, Rep. Barton took up the question with Sebelius, the head of Health and Human Services (HHS) of which CMS is a part. The Washington Free Beacon reported on Sebelius’s response:
Sebelius’s response is a tacit admission from the federal government that the inclusion of the statement posed a legitimate privacy concern, a position not shared by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) who uttered his widely reported “monkey court” remark in response to Rep. Barton’s inquiry at last week’s hearing.
The removal of the inappropriate privacy-related code is not the only revision made recently at the Obamacare website. Earlier this week, copyright language was restored to an open-source script that was used by programmers at Healthcare.gov without proper attribution. The change followed a mid-October report by THE WEEKLY STANDARD on the license violation.
