Feds claim Obamacare taking a toll on government transparency
Federal health officials say a heavy workload caused by the Affordable Care Act, government technology limits and staff shortages are causing unusually long delays in filling public records requests — waits that in some cases could stretch out a decade or more.
The Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to respond to records requests in 20 working days, though providing documents often takes much longer. The FBI, for instance, recently reported that complex requests could average more than two years to fill.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has a backlog of some 3,000 FOIA requests and says it may need 10 years or more to dig out from under some large cases. The Justice Department disclosed the bottleneck in court papers filed Friday in a FOIA lawsuit brought by the Center for Public Integrity against the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of CMS.
The suit, filed in May 2014, seeks a broad array of records as part of the Center’s ongoing investigation into overcharges by private Medicare Advantage insurance plans for the elderly. The Center filed suit after failing to receive any records as a result of its initial FOIA request in 2013.
In its court filing, the Justice Department argued that CMS resources “have been placed under unusual strain” in the past year due to demands of launching Obamacare.
“The ability of HHS to meet its obligations under the FOIA is limited by the scarcity of its available resources,” officials wrote. The CMS office that handles FOIA requests has “only a staff of 19 people to discharge the agency’s FOIA responsibilities,” officials wrote.
Justice lawyers also said CMS has been “handicapped by a lack of technology.”
That’s particularly the case when it comes to providing email communications. CMS said it has about 80 gigabytes of information, mostly emails, stored on software for delivery in other FOIA lawsuits, which it said totaled 8 million pages.
Looking for more, the agency said, is “already straining labor hours and budget of the FOIA staff.” CMS said it had only recently acquired software which should speed things up.
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Health. Click here to read more stories in this topic.
Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
