Since my Internet Archive indexes of both CDC.gov and FDA.gov seem to have gotten a lot of positive responses, I'm following up by tackling a much larger federal healthcare department website: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Unlike the FDA's website, which has around ~5,800 public-facing pages, or the CDC's site which has ~7,200, CMS.gov has a whopping ~75,000 pages.
Needless to say, it's going to take some time to index them all, so bear with me.
No, I don't plan on posting every press release issued by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the Musk/Trump Regime any more than I did under previous adminstrations, but this one attempts to directly address the single biggest Constitutional crisis going on at this very moment.
CMS has two senior Agency veterans – one focused on policy and one focused on operations – who are leading the collaboration with DOGE, including ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems and technology. We are taking a thoughtful approach to see where there may be opportunities for more effective and efficient use of resources in line with meeting the goals of President Trump.
The White House is working on an executive order to fire thousands of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services workers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under the order, the Food and Drug Administration,Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies would have to cut a certain percentage of employees.
...The agencies are responsible for a range of functions, from approving new drugs to tracing bird-flu outbreaks and researching cancer. A loss of staff could affect the efforts depending on which workers are cut and whether they are concentrated in particular areas.
...Agency officials have been told to prepare lists of probationary workers who have essential roles and must be retained, and of employees who don’t, according to people familiar with the instructions.
Federal employees must decide today whether to take the administration’s buyout offer. More than 40,000 federal workers to date have said they would resign under the deal.
(Yes, I'm aware Elon Musk is a naturalized citizen, but given the Musk/Trump Administration's obsession with demonizing immigrants it seems like an appropriate headline)
Representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been working at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where they have gotten access to key payment and contracting systems, according to people familiar with the matter.
The DOGE representatives have been on site at the agency’s offices this week, the people said, and they are looking at the systems’ technology as well as the spending that flows through them, with a focus on pinpointing what they consider fraud or waste. DOGE representatives are also examining the agency’s organizational design and how it is staffed, the people added.
The first official press release from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Trump 2.0 Administration is out, and not only is it pretty innocuously worded...it's actually complimentary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is noteworthy given that the IRA was passed & signed into law exclusively by Democrats & President Biden:
CMS Statement on Lowering the Cost of Prescription Drugs
Lowering the cost of prescription drugs for Americans is a top priority of President Trump and his Administration. In accordance with the statutory requirements of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the list of 15 drugs selected for the second cycle of the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program on January 17, 2025.
Health care spending in the US reached $4.9 trillion and increased 7.5 percent in 2023, growing from a rate of 4.6 percent in 2022. In 2023, private health insurance and Medicare spending grew faster than in 2022, while Medicaid spending and enrollment growth slowed as the COVID-19 public health emergency ended. The health sector’s share of the economy in 2023 was 17.6 percent, which was similar to its share of 17.4 percent in 2022 but lower than in 2020 and 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In October 2024, 79.3 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.
72.1 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid, and 7.2 million individuals were enrolled in CHIP.
41.7 million adults were enrolled in Medicaid, and there were 37.6 million Medicaid child and CHIP enrollees.
Medicaid and CHIP Applications Received
In October 2024, Medicaid, CHIP, Human Services agencies, and State-based Marketplaces received 2.6 million applications, or 2 percent more applications, as compared to September 2024.
The number of applications received has increased by 20 percent since October 2023 and increased by 66 percent since October 2022.
Total Medicaid/CHIP enrollment in October 2024 still dropped very slightly from September...by just 55,000 people.
The Affordable Care Act includes a long list of codified instructions about what's required under the law. However, like any major piece of legislation, many of the specific details are left up to the agency responsible for implementing the law.
While the PPACA is itself a lengthy document, it would have to be several times longer yet in order to cover every conceivable detail involved in operating the ACA exchanges, Medicaid expansion and so forth. The major provisions of the ACA fall under the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), and within that, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS)
Every year, CMS issues a long, wonky document called the Notice of Benefit & Payment Parameters (NBPP) for the Affordable Care Act. This is basically a list of proposed tweaks to some of the specifics of how the ACA is actually implemented for the following year.
(sigh) Goddammit. This isn't terribly surprising but it's still pretty disappointing.
As laid out in my prior (repeatedly updated) story about this ongoing saga, the eligibility of up to 100,000 or so uninsured DACA recipients to enroll in healthcare coverage via the ACA marketplaces has been bouncing back & forth for some time now. President Biden originally made a rule change to make them eligible to enroll back in May 2024. Unfortunately, earlier this fall a coalition of 19 Republican state Attorneys General filed a lawsuit to block the Biden Administration from enrolling DACA recipients, and the courts have ping-ponged their status a few times ever since.
Things were looking good a week or so ago when the 8th Circuit Court issued a stay on the injunction...but I just got the most recent ruling from the 8th Circuit Court, and it's bad news:
