claim: healthcare.gov, otherwise known as the "obamacare" website, cost $5 billion.
question: did the ‘obamacare’ website cost $5 billion?
origin: the day after the fraught iowa caucuses for the 2020 democratic presidential nominee, in which results reporting was delayed due to much-criticized technical difficulty, u.s. president donald trump seized the opportunity to remind the public about another notorious tech fail in democrats’ past:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  trump mused on twitter, “remember the 5 billion dollar obamacare website, that should have cost 2% of that.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  this echoed a familiar false claim, which snopes and others had already debunked.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  in september 2019, we investigated whether the “obamacare” website, healthcare.gov, had a greater price tag than the proposed cost of trump’s border wall. as reported previously by snopes’ bethania palma:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  in august 2014, the inspector general’s office for the u.s. department of health and human services reported that the original estimate for the cost of contracts associated with developing healthcare.gov totaled $1.7 billion. in its own september 2014 investigation, bloomberg government, in an independent analysis, tallied the cost of the website at $2.1 billion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  while it’s no secret there were big problems around the launch of healthcare.gov in 2014, we found no documentation to support the $5 billion price tag trump cited (or even close to that), so we’re rating the new variant of this claim as false.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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comment: u.s. president donald trump resurfaced a stale myth in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
summary: president donald trump mused on twitter about the cost of the healthcare.gov website. this echoed a familiar false claim, which snopes and others had already debunked. in september 2019, we investigated whether the website had a greater price tag than trump’s border wall. we found no documentation to support the $5 billion price tag trump cited (or even close to that), so we're rating the new variant of this claim as false.