Subpoenas, Outsourcing and other HealthCare.gov news

The rocky rollout of HealthCare.gov, the website for people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, has garnered a lot of attention from the media as well as technology analysts. Here's our daily roundup of some of the key reports you may have missed:

• Show Us the Documents: Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., on Thursday subpoenaed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for documents he requested more gently several weeks ago. HHS says it’s trying to comply with the original request, but that it was extremely broad and initially arrived during the shutdown. Sebelius now has until Nov. 13.
• Privacy Violations: HealthCare.gov appears to be violating its own privacy rules by sending users’ personal information to third parties, The Verge reports. Researcher Ben Simo noticed the site was sending his user name and password reset code to the analytics services Pingdom, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics, the article said. The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook and Myspace for similar infractions last year, it noted.
• Outsourcing HealthCare.gov: Health plans are manually checking enrollment files to avoid relying on the HealthCare.gov’s glitchy automatic processing, The Washington Post reports. At least one has paid an offshore firm to do some of this busywork, the paper said, citing an unnamed industry source.
• The Tech Surge Gets a Boost: Google, Red Hat and Oracle have joined the effort to fix HealthCare.gov, CNN reports.