Last month, a bank of webpages explaining how the Affordable Care Act affected Medicaid disappeared from Medicaid.gov. The change appeared to be “a very small part of a much larger effort to diminish and degrade the Affordable Care Act,” as health-policy researcher Peter Cunningham recently told Pacific Standard. (Cunningham was not part of the research team that discovered the changes.)
Officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that runs Medicaid, didn’t answer questions about the removal in time for Pacific Standard‘s story. Thursday evening, however, we received an emailed response from a spokesman:
When the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was initially enacted, CMS needed to have a section that focused solely on Affordable Care Act (ACA) guidance and implementation geared toward our state partners, but over the last eight years, the guidance has been incorporated into the program and a separate ACA section is no longer necessary. As part of routine updates and maintenance to our websites, the standalone ACA portions of the website have been more seamlessly integrated throughout Medicaid.gov.
The explanation is similar to the one he gave for the removal of ACA webpages from Medicare.gov, which occurred in December of 2017: Since the ACA has been law for several years now, officials didn’t think website visitors needed a separate ACA section anymore.
