Home » Posts tagged 'health care'

Tag Archives: health care

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Trump Administration Scrubs Healthcare Website

The Washington Examiner reports that ‘The Trump administration has stripped the Obamacare marketplace of positive references to the healthcare law, including removing the words "Affordable Care Act" from federal websites.’

The article says that the website healthcare.gov as well as information about the Affordable Care Act on the website of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have been "pared-down" to provide fewer details about the law’s insurance reforms and coverage expansions and that entire sections that praised the law’s impact on costs, coverage and care have been removed as well as pages that explain emergency room access and doctor choice.

The Examiner also says that blog posts about Americans who benefited from the law have been removed by employees of HHS who were told remove content that casts the law in a good light.

A comparison of the current About the Law page and the January 4, 2017 copy in the Internet Archive shows that text that highlighted and provided links to additional information about coverage, cost, and care benefits have been replace with text that provides links to Regulations and the IRS.

A February page that provided Facts and Figures now redirects the page of Regulations and Guidance.

Healthcare.gov: The Innovative Development of a .gov Website

In October, the healthcare.gov website will be the site millions of Americans use to choose their health insurance. The new site has been built in public for months, iteratively created on Github using cutting edge open-source technologies. Healthcare.gov is the rarest of birds: a next-generation website that also happens to be a .gov. It will use Jekyll, which allows developers to build a static website from dynamic components. This will make the website faster and more efficient. A fascinating story!

  • Healthcare.gov: Code Developed by the People and for the People, Released Back to the People, by Alex Howard, The Atlantic (Jun 28 2013).

    First, Bryan [Sivak] pledged, “everything we do will be published on GitHub,” meaning the entire code-base will be available for reuse. This is incredibly valuable because some states will set up their own state-based health insurance marketplaces. They can easily check out and build upon the work being done at the federal level….

    Moreover, all content will be available through a JSON API, for even simpler reusability. Other government or private sector websites will be able to use the API to embed content from healthcare.gov. As official content gets updated on healthcare.gov, the updates will reflect through the API on all other websites.

Two New Databases: Non-profits and Hospital Charges

Two new databases were released this week. Both are worth checking out!

  • Nonprofit Explorer. ProPublica.

    In April 2013, the IRS released structured data culled from the tax returns of almost 616,000 tax-exempt organizations. We’ve made this into a searchable database where you can look up organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as well as download their tax filings going back as far as 2001.

  • Medicare Provider Charge Data. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

    The data provided here include hospital-specific charges for the more than 3,000 U.S. hospitals that receive Medicare Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) payments for the top 100 most frequently billed discharges, paid under Medicare based on a rate per discharge using the Medicare Severity Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2011. These DRGs represent almost 7 million discharges or 60 percent of total Medicare IPPS discharges.

    More links at InfoDocket.

Database Tracks States’ Health Reform Legislation

Federal Health Reform: State Legislative Tracking Database, National Conference of State Legislatures.

Health Reform – 2011 State Legislative Tracking Database Overview.

Search 2011 legislation by state, topic, keyword, status, and/or primary sponsor. Database updates occur every other Tuesday, this also includes status updates. The database includes 2011 legislation, including pending, failed and enacted bills and resolutions. The database is intended to capture state actions related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care Education and Reconciliation Act, together referred to as the Affordable Care Act or federal health reform.

Health Indicators from HHS Community Health Data Initiative

“The Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW) is a new resource serving as the data hub for the HHS Community Health Data Initiative. It contains standardized health outcome and health determinant indicators along with associated evidence-based interventions, which can be easily displayed, and will benefit a broad variety of users.”

  • Health Indicators Warehouse (healthindicators.gov).

    The HIW is a collaboration of many Agencies and Offices within the Department of Health and Human Services. The HIW is maintained by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Data, support and funding are provided by the following: * Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services * Department of Health and Human Services: o Office of the Deputy Secretary o Office of Adolescent Health o Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion o Office of Minority Health o Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation * Health Resources and Services Administration. New partners are expected to be added over time.

  • “Health Indicators Warehouse Provides Data Accessibility.” In: COSSA Washington Update, Consortium of Social Science Associations, Volume 30, Issue 3 (February 7, 2011)

    [NHS’s Linda] Bilheimer noted that the Health Indicator Warehouse includes Healthy People 2010, a new set of Medicare indicators, national and state indicators. She emphasized that this is the first time that these indicators have been put in the public domain. She noted that HIW has extensive metadata. HIW is oriented toward large scale developers who want to use the data.

    [NHS’s Amy] Bernstein reported that there are 1,130 indicators listed from 170 data sources

Archives