Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
August 13, 2014 at 04:00 AM
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) says CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner messed up her e-mail archiving by being sloppy when she was trying to keep her Microsoft Outlook inbox under the agency’s size limit.
CMS is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Tavenner has been in charge of HHS efforts to implement many parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable care Act (PPACA), including the public exchange system and the HealthCare.gov enrollment system.
CMS told Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, that it might not be able to give him all of the HealthCare.gov e-mail he wanted because of the inbox cleanup glitch.
See also: HHS: We accidentally deleted some HealthCare.gov e-mails
On the one hand: Issa has certainly pestered CMS over HealthCare.gov, and I have fought many brutal battles with Outlook inbox size limits. Inbox size limits are one of the great menaces of our age.
On the other hand: CMS has been so weirdly defensive and secretive about PPACA implementation for so long that it doesn’t seem as if we can believe that it’s made any good faith efforts to keep and provide PPACA implementation information, including the Tavenner e-mails.
Personally, I have no problem with the goals of PPACA or the idea of the government helping to start a public exchange program, if that’s what people want. And, at this point, it’s for me hard to imagine what could be all that interesting in the Secret Archives of the PPACA exchange program information technology development effort.
CMS seems to have responded to Republican efforts to strangle PPACA, by entering the ACA Trauma Zone.
When we enter the ACA Trauma Zone, we call PPACA “the Affordable Care Act.” All criticisms of PPACA and the PPACA public health insurance exchange system are signs of degenerate Republican efforts to be nasty. All IT guy efforts to talk about the technical challenges involved with implementing PPACA seem to be soft and far away, like the murmuring of seagulls on a beach. Because, when we are one with PPACA, and PPACA is one with us, won’t the computers just … work?
