Remember this time last year, when the HHS chose the ACA open enrollment period to shut down the exchanges during weekends for “system maintenance”? That enrollment suppression tactic must have worked well for them, because they’re doing it again this year:
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — which was harshly criticized last year for a similar move — insists the maintenance downtime occurs every year and will take place during the “lowest-traffic” periods for as little time as possible.
[…] “CMS is clearly at pains to provide assurances of its benign intent in this maintenance schedule,” Eliot Fishman, senior director of health policy at the health advocacy group Families USA, told The Hill. “But with the President continuing to regularly brag about gutting the ACA and with the Administration refusing to defend the law in court, there is reason to be concerned about a schedule that takes the federal marketplace down for long stretches over weekends during holiday season. We’ll be watching this closely.”
[…] This year’s maintenance outage schedule is reportedly the same as last year’s: 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. every Sunday, except for the last Sunday, during the sign-up period. The total scheduled downtime this year ― as it was last year ― is 60 hours.
Knowing that open enrollment just might involve heavy traffic, wouldn’t they want to beat the holiday rush and perform system maintenance in, say, September or October? In the corporate world, an IT staffer who schedules downtime during expected peak periods would be fired for sabotaging productivity.
But in this case, they want to actively hinder the productivity of anyone wanting to access the benefits of the ACA!