China has been trying to put together a database of federal employees. From the Washington Post:
Groups of hackers working for the Chinese government have to date compromised the networks of the Office of Personnel Management, which holds data on millions of current and former federal employees, as well as health insurance giant Anthem, among other targets, the researchers said.“They’re definitely going after quite a bit of personnel information,” said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer of ThreatConnect, a Northern Virginia cybersecurity firm. “We suspect they’re using it to understand more about who to target, whether electronically or via human recruitment [for espionage].”
. . .
Barger’s firm has also turned up technical evidence that the same Chinese group is behind the hacks of Premera Blue Cross and Empire BlueCross, which all were discovered at roughly the same time earlier this year.
So lets try this on for size. The Chinese government uses stolen data from insurance providers to identify somebody with a serious condition (perhaps acute, perhaps chronic), who has just lost their health insurance. China's database tells them that this person's parent is a high ranking federal employee (or handles sensitive information). China makes sure the child lands a job at a front company for the People's Republic Army. He or she can keep that job, and their health insurance, just as long as their parent keeps doing favors for China. . .So can we have single payer yet?