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  • 2017-09-25 (xsd:date)
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  • Is Healthcare.gov Scheduled for Maintenance During Obamacare Enrollment? (en)
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  • In September 2017, numerous news accounts reported that the Healthcare.gov web site was scheduled to be shut down for maintenance on several occasions during the 2018 Obamacare health insurance open enrollment period, which runs from 1 November to 15 December 2017, prompting queries to us from readers about the issue. Kaiser Health News, a self-described nonprofit news service committed to in-depth coverage of health care policy and politics, reported that: Kaiser Health News reporter Phil Galewitz tweeted what appeared to be a slide from a related presentation, including details of the scheduled maintenance: The same slide was independently tweeted by Vox's Sarah Kliff: A spokesperson for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs Healthcare.gov, confirmed the maintenance schedules reported by Kaiser Health News and Sarah Kliff: That spokesperson also said the periods set out for web site maintenance constituted the maximum anticipated amount of downtime, and averred that the actual amount of downtime might end up being less. (We asked CMS to clarify the times involved in the 1 November downtime, which the presentation slide only describes as overnight, but we did not receive a response in time for publication.) The Trump administration has already cut in half the Obamacare open enrollment period, truncating the original period of 1 November 2016 to 31 January 2017 (three months) to the shorter period of 1 November to 15 December 2017 (six weeks). As pointed out by Kaiser Health News, this year's web site maintenance schedule means that Healthcare.gov will be online for 93% of the total time during the six-week open enrollment period. (If we assume the overnight downtime on 1 November will last 12 hours, then the web site will be online for 1,008 out of 1,080 hours.) According to the United States Digital Service, which is part of the Executive Office of the President, the Healthcare.gov web site was online 99.9% of the time during the 2015 and 2016 open enrollment periods, which were themselves twice as long as the upcoming open enrollment period. (en)
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