Trump administration strips down Obamacare website

The pared-down insurance website now links to fewer details about the healthcare law’s insurance reforms and coverage expansions. Entire sections praising the law’s impact on costs, coverage and care have been removed. Some pages, including some that explain emergency room access and doctor choice, have been removed entirely.

And most references to the “Affordable Care Act” have been replaced with simply “healthcare law.”

For example, a section called “About the law” used to contain language crediting it for giving consumers more control over their healthcare and detailing the services insurers must cover. All those details have been removed, and the section now just links to the text of the 2010 law and a separate website where its regulations may be viewed.

The administration also has removed blog posts highlighting Americans who benefited from the law and a section encouraging people to share their own stories using the hashtag #coveragematters.

Employees at the Department of Health and Human Services were told to make the wording changes and remove other language from the federal website that cast the law in a good light, according to former staff. The changes first appeared on Feb. 1, according to web archives.

The changes were made to pages housed at HHS.gov, linked to the federal marketplace healthcare.gov.

Healthcare.gov, a central component of the Affordable Care Act, serves as the enrollment platform for consumers in states not running their own marketplaces. It’s run by HHS, which soon will be led by incoming Secretary Tom Price once confirmed by the Senate, expected Friday.

The 2017 enrollment season concluded last month, and it’s not clear if there will be another enrollment season. President Trump has said he wants to repeal and replace the healthcare law, and congressional Republicans say they’re working on such a measure.

An HHS spokesman didn’t return a request for comment on the changes to healthcare.gov.