Barak Obama

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As Vermont Goes Single Payer, So Goes The Nation?

Molly Worthen | SundayReview | April 5, 2014

Three years ago, Peter Shumlin, the governor of Vermont, signed a bill creating Green Mountain Care: a single-payer system in which, if all goes according to plan, the state will regulate doctors’ fees and cover Vermonters’ medical bills.

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Beyond Net Neutrality

Timothy B. Lee | Vox | May 2, 2014

...Last week Wheeler announced a new set of network neutrality regulations. The details haven't been released yet, but press accounts indicate that Wheeler's proposal will allow internet service providers to offer a "fast lane" for online services, a concept that's anathema to network neutrality stalwarts...

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Burwell Faces Barrage Of Tough Questions In Confirmation Hearing

Erin McCann | Government Health IT | May 8, 2014

President Obama's nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary underwent a Senate committee hearing Thursday morning, during which Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., offered nothing but "highest praise for her work" as deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget, the role which Burwell currently holds.  McCain admitted he recommended Burwell turn down the HHS nomination due to the position being among the "most thankless jobs" in Washington...

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CMS Goes Live with Blue Button - With Life and Cost Saving Applications for 53 Million Americans to Use

On August 13 at the White House in Washington, D.C., the Office of American Innovation and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will host the first Blue Button 2.0 conference. This event will highlight CMS’ strong investment and leadership in Blue Button as a patient driven means for interoperability, cost-effective care and patient safety. Eight years after President Obama’s announcement of the Blue Button initiative to give Veterans, military beneficiaries and Medicare beneficiaries “easy access to their health information” with the use of a “Blue Button”, CMS Administrator Seema Verma took action with “Blue Button 2.0” so that 53 million Medicare beneficiaries can now make use of CMS approved patient facing Blue Button applications, turning a four-year history of claim data into actionable longitudinal health records to prevent costly medical errors, unnecessary redundant care or other harmful and wasteful care.

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Column: ObamaCare Killed My Sister

Doug Graham | Fox Nation | February 10, 2014

This Wednesday, my little sister, Julie, will be buried. She died because she delayed seeking health care for what turned out to be a catastrophic condition after her private health insurance policy was cancelled because of Obamacare...

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Don’t Listen To Google And Facebook: The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership Is Still Going Strong

Bruce Schneier | The Atlantic | March 25, 2014

If you’ve been reading the news recently, you might think that corporate America is doing its best to thwart NSA surveillance. Google just announced that it is encrypting Gmail when you access it from your computer or phone, and between data centers.

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Four Things We Can Do Now to Unlock the Cure for Cancer

As a community we are capable of working together to achieve greater things. If we marshal our resources to work together, I believe we can unlock the cure for cancer. This is a rare opportunity. We need to change the models and shift our culture towards collaboration. We can’t just tweak around the edges — patients and their families can’t afford to wait. An alternative system, where all publicly-funded research and data are required to be shared would allow authors to unlock their content and data for re-use with a global audience, and co-operate towards new discoveries and analysis.

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Here Are The 55 Colleges In America Facing Federal Sexual-Assault Investigations

Dustin Volz | National Journal | May 1, 2014

The Education Department publicly released Thursday a list of 55 U.S. colleges and universities currently under investigation for mishandling sexual-assault cases, a swift and unprecedented move that arrives just days after the White House pledged more transparency on the issue.  The list is populated with large state schools such as Ohio State University and the University of Michigan, as well as prestigious Ivy League schools, including Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton.

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How Can Government Battle A 'Suicide Epidemic' Among Veterans?

Jordain Carney | National Journal | April 3, 2014

The Fort Hood shooting is an extreme and shocking example of what has become a chronic concern for the military: soldiers with mental-health problems taking their own lives.  And it's not just the active-duty military who face what has become an increasingly daunting problem.

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How The NSA Undermines Cybersecurity

Brendan Sasso | Nextgov.com | April 30, 2014

...Officials have warned for years that a sophisticated cyberattack could cripple critical infrastructure or allow thieves to make off with the financial information of millions of Americans. President Obama pushed Congress to enact cybersecurity legislation, and when it didn’t, he issued his own executive order in 2013...

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How To Do Software Like Nasa, By Nasa

Robert McMillan | Wired.com | April 4, 2014

Forty years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Nasa open sourced the software code that ran the guidance systems on the lunar module.  By that time, the code was little more than a novelty. But in recent years, the space agency has built all sorts of other software that is still on the cutting edge.

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Iowa Is Voting on Healthcare Tonight

Health care is no longer about us. Health care is about waste, fraud and abuse. Health care is about “bending the curve”. Health care is about global competitiveness of corporations. Health care is about carving up a $3 trillion opportunity. Health care is about private equity, mezzanine funding, return on investment, valuations and public offerings. Health care is about the economy, and the economy is no longer about us. 

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Lack Of Funding, Clout Didn't Deter Kolodner From Tackling ONC's Top Spot

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | April 10, 2014

Dr. Robert Kolodner had his eyes wide open when he took the top spot at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS.  He knew that his predecessor, Dr. David Brailer, had asked in vain for billions of dollars to help subsidize the cost of EHRS to hospitals and physicians, federal money he thought ONC needed.

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NSA Surveillance Program Reaches ‘Into The Past’ To Retrieve, Replay Phone Calls

Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani | The Washington Post | March 18, 2014

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

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Obama Lets NSA. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say

David E. Sanger | The New York Times | April 12, 2014

Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.  But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

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