Barack Obama

See the following -

The President’s Precision Medicine Initiative – The First Annual Check-Up

Antoinette F. Konski | JD Supra Business Advisor | January 27, 2016

Watching President Obama’s recent 2016 State of the Union Address reminded me that one year has passed since the President announced a new “precision” or personalized medicine initiative to advance personalized, effective therapies for the American public. It was during his 2015 State of the Union Address that the President stated:[1]
“[T]onight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier. We can do this.”...

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The Real Power Of Telehealth: Building Large Networks

Tom Sullivan, | Government Health IT | June 17, 2014

...The vision is to “get access locally when needed, regionally if more important, and globally to access world experts,” Darkins, who leads the VA’s national telehealth programs, said here at the Government Health IT Conference and Exhibition on Tuesday...

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The Republican Case For Waste In Health Care

Phillip Longman | Washington Monthly | March 1, 2013

Conservatives love to apply “cost-benefit analysis” to government programs—except in health care. In fact, working with drug companies and warning of “death panels,” they slipped language into Obamacare banning cost-effectiveness research. Here’s how that happened, and why it can’t stand. Read More »

The Secret History of FEMA

Garrett M. Graff | Wired | September 3, 2017

FEMA gets no respect. Consider: The two men who are supposed to be helping run the federal government’s disaster response agency had a pretty quiet late August. Even as a once-in-a-thousand-year storm barreled into Houston, these two veterans of disaster response—Daniel A. Craig and Daniel J. Kaniewski—found themselves sitting on their hands. Both had been nominated as deputy administrators in July, but Congress went on its long August recess without taking action on either selection—despite the fact that both are eminently qualified for the jobs.

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The Secret Sharer

Jane Mayer | The New Yorker | May 23, 2013

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state... Read More »

The VA Waitlist Fiasco: VistA Should Not be Thrown Out With the Bathwater

Without a doubt, the death of American veterans as a result of the VA waitlist debacle is tragic and unacceptable. The Obama administration must move quickly and deliberately to fix the underlying problems and restore faith in the agency. If these issues were common throughout the VA network of hospitals and clinics, it might make sense to consider dramatic, earth-shaking alternatives like moving veterans to private providers and shuttering the VA. But they are not common. Indeed, as Washington Monthly reporter Phillip Longman has documented, the VA’s challenges are regional, not pervasive. Read More »

The War On Poverty Has Been A Colossal Flop

Robert Rector | The Daily Signal | September 16, 2014

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau will release its annual report on poverty. This report is noteworthy because this year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty...

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The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, And The Missing

Jeremy Gillula and Kurt Opsahl and Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | May 4, 2014

Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we thought was missing...

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The White House Is Pushing Precision Medicine, but It Won’t Happen for Years

Mike Orcutt | MIT Technology Review | July 18, 2016

For starters, it’s too expensive and the science isn’t advanced enough. With the right technologies to collect and make sense of biomedical information, we could speed up the pace of discoveries that lead to a new class of tailor-made drugs. That’s the argument behind the White House’s push for “precision medicine” (see “A Shot in the Arm for Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative”). The goal of precision medicine is to provide drugs and therapies that are uniquely suited to individual patients based on their genetics and other distinguishing health information...

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Three Innovative Tools You Didn’t Think The U.S. Government Could Build

John Paul Titlow | Fast Company | November 11, 2015

After the botched launch of Healthcare.gov in October 2013, it felt like the bugs, headaches, and negative headlines would never stop piling up. But the White House learned its lesson and from the ashes of that blunder, the Obama administration has begun rewiring how government approaches tech. It’s been just over a year since the launch of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and the government digital services agency 18F, but the lessons—and poached talent—from Silicon Valley is already infiltrating the federal government and yielding results...

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Time To Deliver On Federal IT Reform

J. Nicholas Hoover | InformationWeek | November 13, 2012

First four years of the Obama Administration were marked by the beginnings of significant changes in federal IT. Execution will be the name of the game during the next four. Read More »

Time To Pay The Price Of War

Leila Levinson | Huffington Post | September 21, 2012

Help has been slow to come for members of our military and our veterans in crisis. Nearly 1 million veterans from various wars await a ruling from the Veterans Administration on their claims for disability. The VA estimates that in the next several months, another 1.2 million claims will come in as more troops return and more veterans recognize that they suffer from PTSD...
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Todd Park: President Obama's Tech 'Entrepreneur-In-Residence'

Staff Writer | The Takeaway | February 5, 2013

Congress created the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976, but Barack Obama was the first president to appoint a White House chief technology officer. In 2012, Todd Park became the second person to hold the position. Read More »

Top Ten Healthcare Quotes For 2013

Dan Munro | Forbes | December 22, 2013

This list is by no means comprehensive – it’s simply a list of ten quotes I heard (or saw) throughout the year that made me grab a keyboard. Read More »

TPP Is Right Where We Want It: Going Nowhere

Maira Sutton | Electronic Frontier Foundation | April 25, 2014

President Obama is on a diplomatic tour of Asia this week and one of his top priorities is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement that includes restrictive copyright enforcement measures that pose a huge threat to users’ rights and a free and open Internet...Despite some reports of movement on some of the most controversial topics during meetings between Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Abe, it seems that the TPP is still effectively at a standstill...

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