In an uncharacteristic rebuke of one his own, Gov. Peter Shumlin said Monday he was “tremendously disappointed” with his chief health care reform administrator for misleading a legislative committee about a security lapse in the state’s new health insurance exchange.

The official, Department of Vermont Health Access Commissioner Mark Larson, sent a letter of apology Monday morning to members of the House Health Care Committee. Larson said that after listening to a recording of his testimony at a November 5 committee hearing, he had come to the conclusion that he had been insufficiently candid with committee members.

The Associated Press’ Dave Gram reported Friday that Larson’s department had reported what it believed to be an isolated security breach to federal authorities prior to the commissioner’s appearance before the committee. But Larson told committee members that DVHA had investigated only one complaint and believed it to be unfounded, according to Gram.

In his letter to legislators, Larson wrote that he “failed to disclose” the security breach to legislators, a lapse he said violated his responsibility to be fully transparent with his fellow public servants.

Paul Heintz was part of the Seven Days news team from 2012 to 2020. He served as political editor and wrote the "Fair Game" political column before becoming a staff writer.

16 replies on “Shumlin Chastises Health Care Reform Official for Misleading Legislators”

  1. For Peter Shumlin, of all human beings on the planet, to criticize someone for being dishonest… Well, let’s just say he should be struck by lightning. All Larson was doing was modeling the style of his boss.

  2. “Experian has been hired by the feds to verify enrollees’ identity *to the feds.*”
    Right, because the federal government has no way of verifying a persons identitiy?
    The IRS is going to verify your identity every year when you file your taxes and indicate you have health insurance with policy # xxxxxx.
    So why would they pay Experian to do it? Are they just wasting money? Is Experian doing it super cheap so the can mine even more an individuals data? They now have the data, why won’t then put it on their file so that the next time you apply for a loan all your income and subsidies data pops up? For Experian it will be a boon, they would have a significant amount of information over the other two major companies…

  3. Experian has been hired by the feds to verify enrollees’ identity *to the feds.* Seems odd since we know them only as a credit agency, but they have other data collection and analysis functions.
    From Wikipedia: “Experian’s principal lines of business are credit services, marketing services, decision analytics and consumer services. The company collects information on people, businesses, motor vehicles and insurance. It also collects ‘lifestyle’ data from on- and off-line surveys.”
    A lot of people in this country have no credit file at all, and those will be the majority of Medicaid applicants, so Experian sure as heck isn’t going to be looking up their credit histories or passing that on to the insurance companies since there’s no insurance company involved in Medicaid in most states.
    In any case, I repeat, since insurers can no longer modify either a premium or a plan since the law went into effect, they have absolutely no use for your credit information.
    Some people heard the name “Experian” and jumped to the wrong conclusion. There’s a lot of nonsense and scare stories going around about Obama care. There’s always Google to check them out before believing them.

  5. I called a navigator in another state, and I was told that your information is sent to Experian Credit Services for verification purposes, which logs it onto your credit report, what you put on the application for healthcare.

  6. “We’re not talking about a security breach on the order of people hacking into the system or the system being insecure.” — I’d have to call BS on this one. Any developer who engineers a multi-user system such that more than one person could register the same username has committed a colossal blunder. This mistake in design is so basic, so fundamental to multiuser systems that it is inconceivable that additional problems do not exist in the code. We’re probably just looking at the tip of the iceberg…

  7. Sez who? And why would they do that when insurers aren’t allowed to use anything other than age to determine premiums?

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