James O’Keefe exposes questionable Obamacare political “cross-pollination” in Texas

James O’Keefe exposes questionable Obamacare political “cross-pollination” in Texas

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas is out with another investigative video exposing highly questionable “cross-pollination” between Enroll America and Texas Democratic political operatives.

Enroll America bills itself as:

a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to maximize the number of uninsured Americans who enroll in health coverage made available by the Affordable Care Act.

As such, Enroll America cannot get involved in any political activity.

Project Veritas, however, discovered that a Texas-based Enroll America official was willing to push the limits (to put it charitably) or even break the law (to put it not charitably) in order to help someone he thought was a Democratic operative.

Here’s the explanation from the Project Veritas website, Enroll America Director Conspires to Release Private Data (emphasis in original):

Do you know where your personal data is going?

After meeting with several Obamacare Navigators who openly encouraged our undercover reporters to lie about income status, health history and more, it became clear that personal data was also being “cross-pollinated.”

Enter Enroll America, a Sebelius-linked group dedicated to signing people up for Obamacare and Chris Tarango, Texas Enroll America Communications Director who Project Veritas caught on tape agreeing to help obtain a private list of potential Obamacare enrollee data for election/political purposes. Tarango goes so far to say he’ll “Do whatever it f****** takes.”

Here’s the video, the first 15 minutes of which are the edited video, the remainder the raw video:

Eliana Johnson at National Review has a more complete explanation:

Created and run by veterans of President Obama’s campaigns and the Obama White House, Enroll America is using the techniques refined on the 2008 and 2012 campaigns to identify neighborhoods with a high concentration of uninsured residents. In ten states, the organization’s employees and volunteers are going door to door to ensure that, in its own words, “Americans know how and where to sign up for coverage.”

The group first raised eyebrows in the spring when reports emerged that the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, had urged companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, and Ascension Health to lend the organization a helping hand.

Enroll America is not enrolling people directly on the federal exchange. Rather, it is asking them to enter their personal information — basic contact info and insurance status — onto “commitment cards” that signify a pledge to learn more about their insurance options. That information is passed to Obamacare navigators and other application counselors who are enrolling people on the exchanges.

What else might Enroll America be doing with that information? “Their contact info and insurance status are added to our database, and may be shared with partners working on enrollment efforts in that consumer’s community,” an Enroll America spokesman tells National Review Online. “We do not share any data with any 501(c)(4) or other political organizations or candidates.”

But O’Keefe’s investigator, posing as the president of a phony 501(c)(4) political-action committee, caught Enroll America’s Texas communications director conspiring to share its trove of data in order to help him hire a field staff and mobilize voters for the Democratic candidate in an upcoming Texas state-house race. “We can mobilize them if we had that list,” O’Keefe’s investigator tells him.

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