The Trump administration extended the Obamacare sign-up deadline from Sunday to Wednesday after people faced problems with the enrollment website.
The final days of open enrollment tend to bring a surge of visitors and applicants to the enrollment website, called healthcare.gov, and onto call lines, causing delays. But this year, the website faced technical issues on the first day of open enrollment, Nov. 1, as well as on Sunday, which prevented people from being able to enroll in health insurance.
Deadline extensions or “grace periods” were commonplace under the Obama administration as officials struggled to get the website up and running properly. The latest extension is a first under the Trump administration, however, which didn’t face similar problems in the other years it oversaw the website.
As of Monday morning, the healthcare.gov website stated that open enrollment had ended, but the site was back in operation by 1 p.m. when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid announced the deadline extension.
The agency said it was extending the enrollment period “in an abundance of caution,” and disclosed that 500,000 people had signed up for coverage on Sunday.
People who left their names with the call center won’t need to visit the website, but can wait for a representative to contact them and help them finish their enrollment, CMS said.
The healthcare.gov site operates in most states and allows people to sign up for coverage that the federal government helps them pay for. Defenders of Obamacare have accused the Trump administration of working to “sabotage” enrollment by cutting spending on outreach and on “navigators” who help people sign up for coverage. Several defenders of the law, including former CMS acting administrator Andy Slavitt and Democratic presidential candidates, urged the Trump administration to extend the deadline amid the website errors.
