SHOCKER: Donald Trump says things which turn out to be nonsense. News at 11.

When you have diarrhea of the mouth and a "TEN BILLION DOLLAR" megaphone as Donald Trump does, sooner or later you're going to shoot your mouth off about every conceivable topic under the sun. I knew it was just a matter of time before he got to the Affordable Care Act, and while I didn't know exactly what he'd say, I knew that whatever it was, it'd be easily debunked.

Sure enough, a few days ago he apparently did just that:

Donald Trump, the celebrity businessman who has shaken up the Republican presidential race, has been attacking both Republicans and Democrats in his speeches and interviews. At one point in a July 11, 2015, speech in Phoenix, he took aim at the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

He singled out the healthcare.gov website, which was unveiled in the fall of 2013 with a panoply of bugs and glitches, calling it "the $5 billion website for Obamacare, which never worked. Still doesn't work."

PolitiFact does a pretty good job of debunking both claims.

No, Healthcare.Gov didn't cost anywhere near $5 billion; they came up with 3 potential definitions of the "total cost" of the website: Either $834 million, $2.1 billion or, at the very outside, possibly as high as $2.5 billion by now if you include everything (the call center, paper application processing, marketing/advertising and so forth, as well as maintenance of the federal exchange since last year). So, at best, the actual cost of HC.gov has only been half as much as Trump claimed.

Of course, on a per-enrollee basis, that's about $242 per enrollee ($2.5 billion / 10.3 million currently effectuated enrollees), which may sound like a lot until you compare it to, say, Marco Rubio's "Florida Health Choices" White Elephant, which cost Florida taxpayers over $30,000 per person enrolled the last time I checked...a mere 124x as much per customer.

As for the "never worked/still doesn't" part, for some reason the Republican Party can't seem to grasp the concept that it isn't October 2013 anymore. Yes, the launch of HC.gov (along with some of the state-based exchange sites) was an utter disaster. No one is denying this. However, these days, HC.gov is running pretty damned smoothly, and has been for over a year now. Sure, it still needs some work at the back end when it comes to payment data and income/identity verification, but for the most part it's doing dandy.

Anyway, there's not much else for me to add, as PolitiFact did most of the heavy lifting on this one; I mainly just wanted to make sure I included at least one "Donald Trump" entry before the gasbag runs out of air.