Is Obamacare a Political Registration and Data Collection Tool?

A few weeks back we wrote about Obamacare registering people to vote. Now others are talking about it, even saying it is a reason for Democrats pushing Obamacare. 

“The practice raises longstanding suspicions on the right that the ACA exchanges are designed for political as well as regulatory purposes," said Tim Miller, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been characteristically blunt on the subject. "The purpose of Obamacare got nothing to do with your health, and nothing to do with your insurance," he said. "It's about building a permanent, undefeatable, always-funded Democrat majority."

We have seen that Obamacare is, at a minimum, incompetently run in the last few weeks. The concept that that effort also is registering voters is frightening. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has refused to even discuss the issue.

In Washington, Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in March, expressing concerns about the linking of ACA insurance applications to voter registration.

"While the health care law requires that government agencies collect vast information about Americans' personal lives, it does not give your Department an interest in whether individual Americans choose to vote," he wrote.

Obamacare's failures to even launch a website successfully is due in part to all the information that it is trying to collect. The fact that part of that effort is to register people with all that information should be of concern to all Americans.