Crucial weekend for Obamacare starts with website shutdown
Administration marks deadline date for fixing glitches in Obamacare website with 11-hour 'maintenance period'
A crucial weekend for the troubled website that is the backbone of President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul appears to have got off to a shaky start, as the US government took the HealthCare.gov site offline for an unusually long maintenance period on Saturday morning.
Just hours before the Obama administration’s self-imposed deadline to get the insurance shopping website working for the “vast majority” of its users by Saturday, the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced late on Friday night that it was taking down the website for an 11-hour period that would end at 8am on Saturday.
It was unclear whether the extended shutdown of the website – about seven hours longer than on typical day – represented a major setback to the Obama administration’s high-stakes scramble to fix the portal that it hopes eventually will enrol about 7 million uninsured and under-insured Americans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
At the very least, the shutdown suggested that nine weeks after the website’s disastrous launch on October 1 prevented most applicants from enrolling in coverage and ignited one of the biggest crises of Obama’s administration, US officials are nervous over whether Americans will see enough progress in the website to be satisfied.
For the administration and its Democratic allies, the stakes are enormous.
The healthcare overhaul is Obama’s signature domestic achievement, a programme designed to extend coverage to millions of Americans and reduce healthcare costs. To work, the programme must enrol millions of young, healthy consumers whose participation in the new insurance exchanges is key to keeping costs in check.
