Obamacare: "A Hacker's Wet Dream"

Paul Krugman assures us that Obamacare will work. He believes that Republicans are terrified of the possibility that everyone will like it. By his reasoning, if Obamacare is a rousing success, people will happily hand over more and more of the economy to the central government. For a true socialist that is a “consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Of course, Krugman gained some notoriety by declaring that the British National Health Service was working very, very well and that those who thought otherwise were counterrevolutionaries and liars.

The facts did not bear him out. The facts showed him to be a perfect fool. But, being Paul Krugman means never admitting to be wrong.

Among those who are worried about everything that might go wrong with Obamacare is John McAfee. You know John McAfee. If you are reading this on a PC you are very likely to be using an anti-virus program produced by the company he founded.

McAfee has had some personal problems recently, but he surely knows his way around the world of hackers. I venture that he knows more about it than even Paul Krugman.

Yesterday, in an interview he declared that Obamacare was: “a hacker’s wet dream.”

Naturally, McAfee is talking about the software, not the insurance and not the health care delivery system. As of now we mostly know how difficult it is to use the software. McAfee is concerned about hackers putting up fake Obamacare websites to gull the naive and vulnerable.

The Daily Caller reports on the interview:

For starters, McAfee said the way it is set up makes it possible for fake websites be set up to fool people to think they’re signing up for Obamacare.

“It’s seriously bad,” McAfee said. “Somebody made a grave error, not in designing the program but in simply implementing the web aspect of it. I mean, for example, anybody can put up a web page and claim to be a broker for this system. There is no central place where I can go and say, ‘OK, here are all the legitimate brokers, the examiners for all of the states and pick and choose one.’”

“Instead, any hacker can put a website up, make it look extremely competitive, and because of the nature of the system — and this is health care, after all — they can ask you the most intimate questions, and you’re freely going to answer them,” he continued. “What’s my Social Security number? My birth date? What are my health issues?”

He adds that the problem cannot be solved by fixing the software. The system itself was poorly designed:

“Here’s the problem: It’s not something software can solve,” McAfee continued. “I mean, what idiot put this system out there and did not create a central depository? There should be one website, run by the government, you go to that website and then you can click on all of the agencies. This is insane. So, I will predict that the loss of income for the millions of Americans who are going to lose their identities — I mean, you can imagine some retired lady in Utah, who has $75,000 dollars in the bank, saving her whole life, having it wiped out in one day because she signed up for Obamacare. And believe me, this is going to happen millions of times. This is a hacker’s wet dream. I mean I cannot believe that they did this.”

There goes your confidence in government central planners.