Congress
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In The Belly Of The Beast
Sarah – let’s call her that for this story, though it’s neither the name her parents gave her nor the one she currently uses undercover – is a tall, fair woman in her midtwenties who’s pretty in a stock, anonymous way, as if she’d purposely scrubbed her face and frame of distinguishing characteristics. [...] It’s the worst job she or anyone else has had, but Sarah isn’t grousing about the conditions. She’s too busy waging war on the hogs’ behalf. Read More »
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Industry Groups To Congress: 4 Ways To Prioritize Telehealth
A cadre of healthcare industry associations has called on Congress to prioritize telehealth and remote monitoring...
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Insurance Industry Myths About the Uninsured
In 2007, a few months before I left the health insurance industry, I was tasked to write a “white paper” designed to help convince media folks and politicians that the problem of the uninsured wasn’t much of a problem after all. If demographic data was sliced just so, I was expected to write, it was easy to conclude that many of the uninsured — some 46 million at the time — were that way by choice.
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Integrated Health Record Effort Adds To VA's Troubles
The Integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR) program is not the Department of Veterans Affairs' only lightning rod, but it is a major one. Officially in the works since 2011, the records-sharing program took root after 15 years of discussion and cooperation between the two agencies to share military members' health data. Read More »
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Internet Giants, Amid Grumbling, Release New Data On Government Spying
Several Internet behemoths released updated data Monday detailing in broad terms the amount of national security requests for user data they have received from the government, part of transparency reports recently permitted by the Obama administration. Read More »
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Introducing Aaron’s Law, A Desperately Needed Reform Of The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act
The Internet is up for grabs. [...] We need an informed public debate to ensure lawmakers make the right choices that fully preserve the vital openness of the Internet and the privacy and civil liberties of its users. Reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) should be a part of that debate. Read More »
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Is It Time To Revisit Clinger-Cohen?
The time has come to revise the framework that dictates the acquisition process for federal IT, according to two lawmakers in what might be a rare moment of bipartisan agreement. Read More »
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Is Lobbying Closer To Bribery... Or Extortion?
We've certainly talked quite a bit about the institutional-level corruption of the way Congress and lobbying works, but a recent This American Life episode, done in partnership with the Planet Money team takes a much deeper dive into how lobbying works... Read More »
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IT Acquisition Bill Would Push 'Bid-To-Price' Selection Process
An updated draft Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act might open the door to a new way of choosing how to evaluate contractors’ proposals, and because the source selection technique would be in a statute, agencies could slowly shift toward that approach. Read More »
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James Risen's Risk Of Prison Means Journalism Is Being Criminalised
That a New York Times national security reporter may be jailed for refusing to name a source is a total affront to press freedom Read More »
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Joint EHR Costs Skyrocketed To $28 Billion, DoD Says
Physicians spending a paltry twenty or thirty thousand dollars on their EHR implementations can take comfort in the fact that they don’t have to foot the bill for the recently abandoned joint VA-DoD EHR system, which would have cost the taxpayers $28 billion, according to Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense for acquisitions. Read More »
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Joint iEHR Spending Was Focused On Service Contracts
The bulk of spending on the joint EHR proposed by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs went to support service contracts in 2012, according to a new report from the Interagency Program Office (IPO), the agency in charge of modernizing the Military Health System's EHR software. Read More »
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Kill [This] Bill in Congress: The Research Works Act
Academic scholars and patient advocacy groups realized that valuable research findings — already paid for by U.S. taxpayers — were effectively being hidden from the very taxpayers who had actually PAID for this research, and what's more, keeping the findings hidden was not advancing the fields of research as intended. So a number of groups began lobbying lawmakers for more "open access" to this research. Federally-funded biomedical research [in PubMed Central] could be accessed via the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which is funded by National Institutes of Health using a link in PubMed.
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Kludgeocracy In America
In recent decades, American politics has been dominated, at least rhetorically, by a battle over the size of government. But that is not what the next few decades of our politics will be about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will define our major debates will concern the complexity of government, rather than its sheer scope...
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Lack Of Funding, Clout Didn't Deter Kolodner From Tackling ONC's Top Spot
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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