I get my health insurance through Anthem. Corporate Anthem was hacked, and the company has made a mess of their customer relations after the hacking, as I've described from receiving their "help." I now see evidence that my personal information was accessed, and Anthem has never told me.
Anthem and HIPAA
Anthem is really committed to HIPAA. Here's how they explain it on their website.
It's clear from this that Anthem is very committed to privacy and security. Both! Here's some of what they say about privacy.
And here's some of what they say about security.
Anthem clearly had all the bases covered. Except they didn't. What's mind-blowing to me is that, in spite of all the security-privacy-lah-de-dah, someone walked off with the personal information of tens of millions of customers -- and no alarm even went off! The breach was actually discovered by an alert grunt in the trenches.
Hacking David Black
Anthem has communicated to its members that they would let them know when they discovered whether any particular member was among those who had been hacked. I haven't heard a thing from them. But I now know that it's likely that my information was stolen.
I went into the standard Anthem consumer portal a little while ago.
I poked around a little, and discovered this little bombshell:
In other words, "I" had logged in at quarter after one in the morning on Saturday, Jan 31, 2015. However, I personally wasn't logged into Anthem at that time. I was asleep.
The Good News
There's good news here! I already knew that Anthem either didn't know whether I'd been hacked or had decided to not tell me, so no change there. My opinion of Anthem was already subzero, so it didn't get noticeably lower. Furthermore, in spite of all this, Anthem executive management will continue to rake in millions, and they're pretty sure that profits won't be harmed:
What a relief!
Conclusion
Nothing new here. Big corporations comply with all the burdensome regulations, and tens of millions of private records somehow get stolen. The result: lots of face-saving talk that does no one any good, and increased competition-stifling regulation that does nothing to solve the problem. Nothing to see here, people ... move along...
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