The Race Is On To Download And Preserve Obamacare Data In Trump’s America

FILE - This March 1, 2014 file photo shows part of the website for HealthCare.gov, seen in Washington. President Barack Obama’s health care law has become a tale of two Americas. States that fully embraced the law... FILE - This March 1, 2014 file photo shows part of the website for HealthCare.gov, seen in Washington. President Barack Obama’s health care law has become a tale of two Americas. States that fully embraced the law’s coverage expansion are experiencing a significant drop in the share of their residents who remain uninsured, according to an extensive new poll released Tuesday. States whose leaders still object to “Obamacare” are seeing much less change. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, cumulatively based on tens of thousands of interviews, found a drop of 4 percentage points in the share of uninsured residents for states that adopted the law’s Medicaid expansion and either built or helped run their own online insurance markets. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File) MORE LESS
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A team of independent researchers is working to download Obamacare data and preserve it before Trump takes office in January.

According to a Wednesday report from Politico, the effort started independently, but Jeanne Lambrew, the White House’s top health reform official, has also been encouraging the effort.

Lambrew declined to comment to Politco.

“We are not going to speculate on what sort of policies President-elect Trump may choose to prioritize or pursue,” a representative of the Department of Health and Human Services told Politico.

The fear is that Trump – who campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare and has expressed skepticism over government data– may do away with or just ignore important information that shows how people use the Affordable Care Act.

“Democrats may need it to build their case for why large pieces of the controversial law should be left intact. They say the data may be helpful for devising other reforms, including an eventual Obamacare replacement and, at minimum, should be preserved as part of the historical record,” Politico wrote.

While Republicans told Politico they thought the rush to copy the data was paranoid, Democrats have begun being more worried about the data since reports have surfaced that climate researchers have begun copying their own data out of fear that Trump – who has doubted global warming– might erase or dismiss it.

“Some groups are downloading pieces, with the hopes that collectively we’ll be able to download the important stuff,” one researcher told Politico.

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