Trump Admin To Sabotage Obamacare Website During Open Enrollment Period

The Trump Administration has decided that the best time to run maintenance on the government’s Affordable Care Act website will be in the upcoming open enrollment period, meaning that people who go online to sign up won’t be able to do so. This is a designed sabotage by the administration meant to show what a failure the program is, even though the failures are planned. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

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I guess if you had to boil down the entire theme of the Trump Administration, it would be, "Let's undo everything Obama did." Case and point is the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. The Republicans in power today, along with Donald Trump, they have tried time, and time, and time, and time again over the last year and a half to get rid of the Affordable Care Act because they hate it because it's associated with Barack Obama.

Now, tens of millions of people here in the United States depend on that to get their health insurance, but they still want to do away with it because it's a good thing that Obama did. It's not great, it could've been great but we let the lobbyists rewrite a little bit of the bill so it's just good instead of wonderful. But the Trump Administration has not given up on their plans to dismantle and destroy the Affordable Care Act, and their attempts to show the American people that it's a really crappy piece of legislation.

Their latest rounds of attack are about to begin in November. Because what they have announced is that they're going to basically sabotage the healthcare.gov website, where people go to sign up for Obamacare. They're going to sabotage it during the open-enrollment period from November 1st through December 15th. They're going to do that by taking it offline on most Sundays during that period, as well as other days and times all throughout the open-enrollment time frame.

They're doing this, allegedly, because it's, you know, "Routine maintenance. Making sure the website's kicking and doing well, so we're just going to take it offline, you can access it for 12 to 14, maybe 24 hours, on any given day. But it's to benefit you." Here's the thing. Obviously, you don't have to do maintenance during that period. If you know it needs maintenance today, you could actually do it today. You could do it tomorrow. You could set it up to happen a whole week before November 1st. You've got plenty of time to do it.

It's the timing of this that matters. If the website wasn't functioning properly, as anybody who's ever run a website can tell you, you don't sit there and wait until you know you're about to hit a busy period to make corrections to it, unless it inevitable, like, if it goes down right now. That's not the case here. They know it needs the maintenance, they know they need to update some codes, update some options, update some tax laws on there, it could be done right now. It could've been done six months ago, but they wanted to wait for the perfect moment to sabotage it so fewer American citizens could use the program, so that they could then have the clearance to say, "Hey, look, fewer people signed up this year because it's a complete failure, so we should do away with it."

It is the typical Republican way of governing. Destroy the government from the inside, then go back to your constituents and say, "See, I told you the government was all screwed up. Look at how bad everything is right now." Yeah. The back half of that story is that you screwed it up, and you screwed it up intentionally just so you could tell people that the government doesn't work properly.