Trump's HHS makes it harder for women to get free breast cancer tests
Secretly deleting resources from the HHS website is just another sneaky way the Trump administration is undermining women’s health and Obamacare.
The Trump administration has found another way to depress the number of people signing up for Obamacare coverage: delete info on how women benefit from the plans.
According to an investigation by the Sunlight Foundation, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has removed information from WomensHealth.gov about breast cancer screenings — including information about how to obtain coverage for those screenings with no out-of-pocket cost using Obamacare.
“The information removed is especially helpful to low-income individuals and people of color, such as important insurance information,” notes Amanda Gomez at ThinkProgress. “The ‘Government in action’ section previously highlighted a government program that connected low-income, uninsured, and underinsured people to breast and cervical cancer screening and diagnostic services. The main breast cancer webpage also linked to a Spanish version.”
Administration officials claim this was simply a cleanup of duplicative information. But the motives are questionable when set against the context of everything else Trump has done to sabotage Obamacare.
Since Trump took office, he has scaled back enrollment periods and advertising for coverage. He’s ended cost-sharing payments to insurers. He signed a tax bill that repeals individual mandate. He issued executive orders making it much easier for insurers to issue junk “short-term” and “association” health plans exempt from consumer regulations. He tried to let businesses end birth control coverage. And he is now letting Republican governors kick people off Medicaid when patients can’t find a job.
This isn’t the first time Trump’s HHS deleted information from government websites that happen to inconvenience Trump’s social agenda.
Immediately after Trump took office, language throughout HHS.gov webpages was tweaked to remove lines that referred to Obamacare favorably.
And earlier this year, watchdogs noted that pages with information on lesbian and bisexual health had also been removed from WomensHealth.org.
Other departments have seen similar ideological revamps of their websites. For instance, under Scott Pruitt, the EPA scrubbed dozens of references to “climate change” from the agency website, along with resources to help local governments with emissions reduction and sustainability.
These changes make the administration’s priorities crystal clear. They are showing that Trump’s government is no longer interested in addressing these issues — and doesn’t care if you are, either.
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