government

To improve medicine and health IT, we need a big heaping dose of data. That’s the takeaway from a conversation with Aneesh Chopra, the former U.S. CTO and assistant to President Obama, at South by Southwest in Austin on Friday. Read More »

Tens of thousands of people who discovered that HealthCare.gov made mistakes as they were signing up for a health plan are confronting a new roadblock: The government cannot yet fix the errors. Read More »

The nation is about to see what an "entrepreneur-in-residence" can do with open data and technology.

The White House has announced that Todd Park (@Todd_Park), the chief technology officer for the Department of Health and Human Services, will step into the role left open by Aneesh Chopra, the first person to hold the newly created position... Read More »

When big health insurers propose mergers, it makes for good antitrust enforcement theater to try to block them. However, if government officials want to address anti-competitive activities that have a dramatically bigger impact, they should shift their focus to local market provider M&A activity that consistently show prices increase after the deal is done. However, the most rapacious, anti-competitive practices I’ve seen in my entire career have come from hospitals–frequently from tax-exempt “nonprofits” that would make John D. Rockefeller blush with their brutal actions. The combined impact has created a middle class economic depression that has driven populist presidential campaign success, which was highlighted in a recently released Brookings study.

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It’s been widely reported that the NSA is in the midst of collecting huge volumes of call metadata from Verizon associated with all domestic and international calls made by the company’s customers for three months [...]. Less attention has been paid to what exactly the government does with all that data or the technology supporting it. Read More »

On April 9th of last year, someone called Iceeey proposed a change to an obscure document written by the federal government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The document wasn't that important. [...] But this small request was a very big deal. Read More »

With the launch of the new Code for America Brigade website, we asked Program Director Kevin Curry to talk about its mission and how you can bring ‘civic hacking’ to where you live. Read More »