QUESTION:
Did both Obama and Trump shut down the Obamacare website during open enrollment?
ANSWER:
Yes.
SOURCES:
Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services spokesperson
Healthcare.gov blog
US Department of Health and Human Services- Office of the Inspector General- Healthcare.gov Case Study
PROCESS:
Twitter users are accusing Trump of intentionally planning sporadic shut downs of the Obamacare website during open enrollment, which kicked off November 1.
A viewer sent an article that says Obama did the exact same thing and asked us to Verify.
To get answers, we dug into what happened when the website first went live.
Healthcare.gov got off to a rocky start in 2013; the site crashed after just two hours. There were 24 and 36-hour outages that first October 2013 during open enrollment, according to a case study commissioned by the agency's Inspector General.
"[Health and Human Services] and [Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services] made many missteps throughout development and implementation that led to the poor launch...HHS and CMS missteps included devoting too much time to developing policy, which left too little time for developing the website," HHS Inspector General Daniel Levinson wrote in 2016. "CMS continued on a failing path to developing HealthCare.gov despite signs of trouble, making rushed corrections shortly before the launch that proved insufficient."
By early November 2013, the ACA website crashed more often then it functioned properly. The team didn't properly predict how many people at one time would use the site: there were five times as many simultaneous users as anticipated. The study also found "core problems in website performance."
"In the end, only six consumers were able to submit an application and select a plan on the first day of the first open enrollment," Levinson wrote.
The public backlash, both from Congress and the administration, was so cogent, then-Health and Human Services Katheen Sebelius stepped down.
Since then, presidents have scheduled regular "maintenance periods" for the IT teams to fix bugs and for healthcare marketplace employees to fix problems.
Our Verify researchers obtained data from a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services spokesperson.
This year, the website will be down five Sundays, from Midnight until noon, for a total of 60 hours:
Sunday, November 4, 2018 from 12 a.m. -12 p.m.
Sunday, November 11, 2018 from 12 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Sunday, November 18, 2018 from 12 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Sunday, November 25, 2018 from 12 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Sunday, December 2, 2018 from 12 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Sunday, December 9, 2018- no downtime
Last year, the Trump Administration planned for the website to be down five Sundays for 60 hours but it was actually down for 21.5 hours.
In 2016, under the Obama Administration, the website planned to be down five Sundays for 54 hours, but it worked out to a total of six Sunday and 53.5 hours.
Sunday, November 6, 2016 from 12 a.m. - 8 a.m.
Sunday, November 13, 2016 from 12 a.m. - 5 a.m.
Sunday, November 20, 2016 from 12 a.m. - 10 a.m.
Sunday, November 27, 2016 from 12 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Sunday, December 4, 2016 from 12 a.m. - 10 a.m.
Sunday, December 11, 2016 from 12 - 7 a.m.
So we can Verify, yes both Trump and Obama temporarily shut down the ACA website during open enrollment.
