"The new HealthCare.gov is set to open for broad testing by insurers on Tuesday, but they’re not going to be publicly talking—or tweeting—about it," Wall Street Journal reporter Anna Wilde Mathews noted in a story filed shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern Tuesday, adding that the Journal learned that the federal "Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services emailed insurers that it would require all testers to acknowledge the confidentiality of this process to access the testing environment.'"
Wilde Mathews noted that the Obama administration made no such stipulation last year during testing for the federal ObamaCare portal and added that the confidentiality requirement is pretty broad:
The new confidentiality agreement won’t just cover the industry data that will be included in the marketplace’s testing environment. It also includes “results of this testing exercise and any information describing or otherwise relating to the performance or functionality” of HealthCare.gov.
Essentially we have another instance of the Obama administration shutting down an avenue where potentially bad news involving more ObamaCare snafus can seep out into the public domain prior to the November 4 midterm elections. Given the high stakes of the midterms and the Obama administration's penchant for restricting press access, one might think the media would be up in arms, but alas, they aren't.
None of the broadcast evening newscasts for October 8 covered the story, and it's highly unlikely they will in the near future.
Indeed, for its part, the Journal itself found the story rather boring, squeezing it in on the bottom of page A4 of the October 8 edition with the bland headline, "Health Site Testing to Be Confidential."
