Health Exchange Security and Transparency Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CANTOR. I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. Speaker, I want to rise in support of the Health Exchange Security and Transparency Act. If I could just take a few seconds to respond to the allegations put forward by the gentleman from California, the ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee, I want to just make a point, Mr. Speaker. There is a real difference between users of a retailer's Web site and users of healthcare.gov because those who choose to go on the Web site of a retailer in the private sector do so at their choice.

The people of this country, all of the American people now, if they go to healthcare.gov, they are being forced to go to healthcare.gov, and so for the gentleman to sit here and say, well, we don't require this out of the other industries, banks or anything else, I would beg to differ. There are certainly requirements in law and duties owed by banks to their shareholders, customers and the rest, but I would say to the gentleman, this is a situation where the law at hand is requiring individuals--mandating them--to go to this site.

So contrary to the allegations made by the gentleman, what this bill does is it just requires the administration to provide 48 hours' notice after a breach of health care information or financial data. All it says is the administration has to let victims of identity theft or information theft be notified. That is it. This is a good government bill. Why do we want to wait until there is a data breach?

I would ask the gentleman to look to a quote by CMS' own chief information security officer, Teresa Fryer. She said that the Federal exchange ``does not reasonably meet security requirements.'' That is what the chief cybersecurity officer at the agency says, the exchange ``does not meet security requirements.''

Now, the Experian credit bureau said:

The health care industry, by far, will be the most susceptible to publicly disclosed and widely scrutinized data breaches of 2014.

If we know this, why wouldn't we take precautions to help people? That is all this bill does. It says if there is a risk of data breach, we should afford people the opportunity to take corrective action immediately. That is it. There is no message in there. This is just trying to help people.

So I would say to the gentleman, if he would just set aside the partisan attacks for once, let's help people. Let's go about the way we should be in putting people first here. We disagree on this law in requiring health care the way government says we should require, yes, but I think we can all agree we want to help people, and we want to make sure that they can keep their information safe. That is all this bill is about.

So I want to thank Chairman Fred Upton, Chairman Joe Pitts, and the members serving on the committees who have been conducting oversight on the issue for the past year, including the Science Committee, the Homeland Security and the Oversight and Government Reform Committees. Congresswoman Diane Black, certainly the gentleman from Florida, Gus Bilirakis, and Representative Kerry Bentivolio have all worked hard on this issue. I commend them for their efforts to just help people for once.

With that, I urge adoption and passage of the bill.

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