A lot of federal money goes to state and local health programs. For example, consider mammograms. A state will be given a budget to spend on mammograms. The state doesn't do those screenings itself, so it solicits bids from several healthcare organizations. Those organizations create proposals with estimates of the number of residents eligible for free screening in their area, the burden of breast cancer among that group, and whether those potential patients fall into underserved or high risk demographics. All of that comes from high quality data published by the federal government. Those groups pull data from these online data sets.

Your grandma might have gotten free mammograms because of that data.

Agreed that your grandma is unlikely to access the data directly, however that doesn't imply she is not affected by it's removal. As others have noted, professionals your grandma almost certainly depends upon(doctors for example) rely on the data.

Luckily, we live in a society of specialists, and while you are laying bricks, public health orgs are generating reports and taking interviews and making these data accessible and meaningful to you.

So, yes, your grandma relies on a data "supply chain" but, nevertheless, it benefits her.

A lot of the user facing pages with general info about stuff like HIV has been deleted too.

It's a bit like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who can't read. The signs are there for the people that are using the road, and if you're not using the road you can safely ignore it.

It's also a bit like saying that medical school is an elitist institution that only benefits the medical class. :-)

More like asking whether road signs are effective for Americans who are passengers in cars. No, it doesn't directly do her any good that they're technically accessible since she can't act on it, but it sure as hell affects her life that other people have access to the information provided by road signs.

I'm not sure the analogy works: roads were around long before writing, and there are still road users who can't read. That is why pedestrian crossing signals use lights in the shape of a person rather than written instructions.

That's why this is more of an attack on the Hacker News demographic, not Grandma.

If you had a real startup doing real things in healthcare, this is an intentional spoke in your wheels.

Grandma goes to the doctor.

That's only an indirect effect. The direct attack will be when grandma can no longer afford to see the doctor.

Indirect does not mean lesser. An ill-informed doctor might be just as bad as no doctor.