Donald Trump Takes A Swipe At Obamacare Website After Announcing Coronavirus Page
President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the Rose Garden on Friday afternoon amid the coronavirus pandemic. During the speech, the president announced that Google is developing a coronavirus website, later appearing to take a swipe at the site for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. HealthCare.gov was implemented during the administration of former President Barack Obama in 2014.
“Google is helping to develop a website,” Trump said. “It’s gonna be very quickly done, unlike websites in the past.”
The president continued to claim that the coronavirus website will help “determine whether a test is warranted” and — if so — to help “facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location.”
Many people on social media noted what seemed to be a veiled jab at the online home of Obamacare.
“Trump seems to take a veiled shot at the problems of the…Obamacare website,” wrote CNN reporter David Dale.
“Not even veiled. His voice inflection changed and reverted back to his gleeful a**holedom,” one user responded.
This is not the first time Trump has supposedly taken aim at the ACA website. As reported by The Independent’s Indy100, he previously suggested during a Las Vegas rally that his 13-year-old son Barron could build a better site than the one designed for Obamacare.
“Remember when they had – this was the greatest – the $5 billion website. $5 billion. It was supposed to cost $5 million. I have a son at home, he’s 13. He’s a genius with computers.”
Discussing Google's role in building a website to aid mobile coronavirus testing, Trump says the site "will be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past." pic.twitter.com/gUPf0R07uV
— The American Independent (@AmerIndependent) March 13, 2020
According to Snopes, the Obamacare website did not cost $5 billion, as Trump claimed. Writing for the publication, Bethania Palma noted that per the Inspector General’s office for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the cost of the site was $1.7 billion. In a separate independent analysis, Bloomberg Government suggested that the price was $2.1 billion.
Although Snopes noted “big problems” with the launch of the ACA website in 2014, the publication claimed it did not find evidence that the price was anywhere close to $5 billion.
As The Inquisitr previously reported, Trump has seemingly been attempting to shift blame for his administration’s controversial response to the coronavirus pandemic to Obama. Early Friday morning, the president raged at his predecessor for allegedly complicating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) response to the virus outbreak. According to Trump, the lack of available tests is due to decisions that Obama made during his administration.
“For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it,” the president tweeted, adding that the system was “inadequate” for a large-scale pandemic.
According to Trump, the Obama administration was hoping a pandemic would never happen. The president’s comments, however, go against those from Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett, who accused him of destroying the pandemic response network Obama set in place out of spite.