In my recent WEEKLY STANDARD essay, “Privacy Be Damned,” I warned about the operational problems and privacy issues raised by the “health exchanges” that HHS will force tens of millions of Americans to use as of October 1 of this year. In that essay, I noted that “the HHS inspector general and the GAO have been snoozing on their watches.”

Just days after the article appeared, the HHS inspector general issued an “audit report” on the health exchanges, perhaps the shortest one his office has ever issued on a significant topic. In less than five pages of analysis the report did little except note more missed deadlines. Some of the hard-hitting “observations” included: