Obama Administration

See the following -

“United States of Secrets”: How The Government Came To Spy On Millions Of Americans

Press Release | FRONTLINE, Kirk Documentary Group , Rain Media | April 24, 2014

...Now, in United States of Secrets, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to reveal the dramatic inside story of how the U.S. government came to monitor and collect the communications of millions of people around the world—including ordinary Americans—and the lengths they went to trying to hide the massive surveillance program from the public...

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12 Ways ObamaCare Has Failed The Working Class

Jed Graham | Investor's Business Daily | October 25, 2015

How could a law intended to make health care affordable and reduce inequality end up failing — or even hurting — millions of working-class Americans who were supposed to benefit? At least a dozen different ways.ObamaCare is helping millions of people, as one would expect of such a vast and costly undertaking. Yet the law has so many serious flaws that it's hard to keep track of them. This accounting, or cheat sheet, of ObamaCare flaws that hit the working class especially hard, reveals why the law will yield more bitter fruit as it ages.

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21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead

I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly.   In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary  and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...

5 Health Challenges The World Will Face In 2015

Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman | Vox | December 23, 2014

What comes next for the future of the world's health?... But these are the issues reason would suggest will set the world's health agenda next year...

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A Look Inside Chicago's Open Gov Hack Nights

Megan DeGruttola | OpenSource Delivers | December 4, 2014

The government’s open data movement, sometimes referred to as Gov 2.0, has come a long way in the past few years. Most are familiar with the Obama administration’s open data initiative and the launch of Data.gov, but there are extremely active open data civic movements taking place in cities across the U.S...

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A Real Stand Against Antibiotic Resistance Starts At The Farm, Not The Hospital

Arielle Duhaime-Ross | The Verge | September 30, 2014

The US government made history on September 18th when President Obama signed an executive order establishing a task force to combat antibiotic resistance at the federal level. The order outlined general goals such as tracking the use of antibiotics and creating incentives for drug development. Some applauded the announcement, while pointing out other countries’ continued failure to do the same...

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After Long Delay, Obama Declines To Rule On Petition Calling For Firing Of DOJ Officials Over Aaron Swartz’s Suicide

Brian Fung and Andrea Peterson | The Washington Post | January 8, 2015

The White House has declined to rule on a petition that called for the firing of two Justice Department officials over the handling of a controversial court case involving Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide in 2013 after being accused of hacking into a university network...

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Agencies Under The Gun To Meet Data Transparency Deadlines

Jack Moore | Nextgov.com | December 3, 2014

The Obama administration has six months to prove its implementation of a sweeping new data transparency law is on track...

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Android OS: Closing The Door On Open Source?

Julie M. Anderson | Nextgov.com | October 10, 2014

In recent weeks, the federal government has accelerated its efforts to promote the use of open source platforms as a way to improve the array of digital services it offers.  At the same, agencies are looking to secure the more powerful (but potentially vulnerable) landscape of mobile devices federal employees increasingly use in the workplace...

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As Todd Park Becomes Top Tech Recruiter, What's Next For CTO Role?

Rebecca Carroll | Nextgov.com | August 29, 2014

When Todd Park was asked in 2009 to become the Department of Health and Human Services' first chief technology officer, he wasn’t looking for a government job...The Obama administration announced Thursday that in his new role working for the White House from Silicon Valley, Park will continue his recruiting efforts and keep policy officials in touch with tech world developments and trends....

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Before Privatizing The VA, Publicize It

Leah Binder | The Health Care Blog | June 1, 2014

The Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital scandal has policymakers calling for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s head, and this week they got it, when President Obama accepted the Secretary’s resignation...

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Berwick Platform: ‘Seriously’ Explore Single Payer, Review Cost Control

Carey Goldberg | NPR Boston | November 21, 2013

Granted, a candidate releasing his platform on health care for a race that’s a full year away might not strike you as big breaking news...That candidate is Dr. Donald Berwick, former chief of Medicare in the Obama administration, and that territory is the idea of a “single-payer” system — a sort of “Medicare for all” that’s common in other developed countries but that faces some strong opposition in the United States...

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Childbirth Death Is Way More Likely In The US Than The UK, And It’s Getting Worse

Rachel Feltman | Quartz | May 2, 2014

The US is one of only eight countries to see an increase in childbirth-related deaths since 2003, according to a study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. While maternal mortality has dropped by 3.1% in developed countries (and 1.3% globally) since 1990, it increased by 1.7% in the US during the same time period...

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Clueless or Craven? The White House Gets the VA Story Exactly Backwards

Sad to say, the Obama administration seems clueless about what might be broken at the VA and how to fix it. Either that, or it is just cravenly saying and doing whatever it thinks is necessary to make the story go away. Evidence for the clueless hypothesis came on Friday, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors weighed in with his diagnosis (pdf) of what ails the VA. The document is extraordinary in its contradictions, sloppy formulations, and non-evidence-based conclusions.

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Cybersecurity Check In

Fred Trotter | The Healthcare Blog | September 13, 2016

No one likes to think about the possibility that patients might be hurt or killed as a result of cyber attacks. But all signs indicate that this is a real possibility and a serious problem. Attacks on Health IT systems such as EHRs or patient portals, electronic medical devices, or on standard healthcare digital systems can be a threat to patient safety...

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