The latest salvo in the Trump administration’s battle to sink the Affordable Care Act has been launched. The already shortened enrollment period has now been further curtailed by the announcement from the administration that the federal health insurance exchange website, healthcare.gov, will be shut down “for maintenance” for 12 hours during all but one Sunday in the upcoming open enrollment season.

Kaiser Health News reports that not only will the shutdowns occur from 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET every Sunday except December 10, but the Department of Health and Human Services will also shut down healthcare.gov overnight on the first day of open enrollment, November 1. More than three dozen states, the report says, use that exchange for their marketplaces.

The administration has already shortened the enrollment period, withdrawn money for advertising and cut the budget for navigator groups, which help people shop for plans. But to also shut down the website on Sundays will prevent many working patients—those who constitute the prime target group for ACA insurance — from shopping for their insurance at the time many of them find most accessible, according to critics of the shutdown.

“The Department of Health & Human Services is actively trying to prevent people from signing up for healthcare coverage,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-VA, is quoted saying in a tweet. He adds, “This is outrageous.”

This year’s open enrollment season runs only from November 1 to December 15, which is less than half the time people have had previously for signing up during the ACA’s first four years of exchanges. More than 12 million people enrolled on state and federal marketplaces for 2017 coverage, including more than 9 million on the federal exchange. ACA advocates were already concerned that the truncated signup period would mean that fewer people would sign up this year.

The report quotes Jason Stevenson, spokesman for the Utah Health Policy Project, an ACA navigator group, saying, “I could see this really impacting the ability of people to complete an application signup in a single sitting, which is so important.” Stevenson pointed out that 10 p.m. mountain time is often a relatively popular time for people to enroll online.

“Health insurance is complicated, and in the past couple of years we had an administration that made it easier to sign up, but that has really changed in the past six months, with more hurdles not only for consumers but for those whose job it is to help them,” Stevenson adds.

While a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees the exchanges, claimed that the shutdowns should not cause too many problems, former Obama administration officials are not so optimistic, pointing out that the planned shutdowns of healthcare.gov go far beyond earlier events; instead, they say that usually the online enrollment system was offline for only a few hours at a time and such interruptions were much less frequent than once a week.

“Maintenance outages are regularly scheduled on healthcare.gov every year during open enrollment. This year is no different,” the CMS official is quoted saying; the official spoke on background, the report says, and requested anonymity. “The maintenance schedule was provided in advance this year in order to accommodate requests from certified application assisters. System downtime is planned for the lowest-traffic time periods on healthcare.gov, including Sunday evenings and overnight.”

But a federal report to Congress said that for the 2015 and 2016 open enrollment seasons, healthcare.gov was online 99.9 percent of the time. The Trump administration plan cuts that to just 93 percent of the time, and during an enrollment period that is only half the length it used to be. While the shortened enrollment season amounts to just 45 days instead of the previous 90, the “maintenance” shutdowns further shorten it to the equivalent of a mere 42 days.

“There is just a really big question as to why this is happening,” Lori Lodes, former CMS communications director, says in the report. “Have they done a comprehensive review of the tech and believe this is what is actually necessary? If so, then why don’t they have confidence in the system?”

Instant Insights /

Healthcare.gov announces series of maintenance shutdowns

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