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A Republican and a Democrat in the Senate are uniting over worries about cyberattacks on the U.S. health benefits sector.
The lawmakers joined to write to Dan Amos, the chairman and chief executive officer of Aflac, to ask him about an attack on Aflac's supplemental insurance systems that was disclosed in June.
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Aflac said in June that it had learned of a breach June 12 and was still determining the scope of the attack.
"What steps is Aflac taking to identify what information may have been compromised?" the senators ask in the letter. "When does Aflac expect to finalize steps to identify this information? How is Aflac proactively communicating with potentially impacted individuals and entities?"
The senators also ask about the security safeguards Aflac used, when it first learned about the attack on its systems and when it told federal agencies about the attack. The lawmakers have asked Amos to provide answers by Sept. 5.
The senators who signed the letter are Dr. Bill Cassidy, a Republican physician from Louisiana who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire.
Representatives for Aflac were not immediately available to comment.
What it means: Cassidy and Hassan have concerns about the potential impact of health sector cyberattacks on access to health care, the quality of health care and the ability of the United States to defend itself.
"Numerous federal agencies have recently warned of the growing risk of potential attacks by hostile actors, including Iran, against U.S. health care entities," the senators wrote in their letter.
For employers and benefits professionals, the letter appears to indicate that more health cybersecurity legislation could be coming and that the difficulty of logging into the systems used to administer health benefits may not ease any time soon.
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