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Reuters
President Barack Obama declared himself frustrated on Monday with the malfunctioning website that is central to his signature healthcare law and vowed to take steps to fix it.
Scrambling to get ahead of a burgeoning political uproar over implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Obama took to the White House Rose Garden to insist the law is bigger than just a website and that eventually the bugs in the software will get worked out.
Online insurance exchanges were launched on October 1 under the 2010 law, often called "Obamacare," to offer health insurance plans to millions of uninsured Americans.
But people trying to shop for health insurance at healthcare.gov have been frustrated by error messages, long waits and system failures, with many failing to make it through the system despite repeated tries.
The president acknowledged the depth of the problem.
"There's no sugarcoating it. The website has been too slow. People have been getting stuck during the application process. And I think it's fair to say that nobody is more frustrated by that than I am," Obama said.
NPR
The website that's meant to allow Americans to shop and sign up for new medical plans under the Affordable Care Act isn't working as well as it should, President Obama says. But he promised that the problems will be fixed — and he said the Affordable Care Act is bringing many benefits that aren't tied to those problems."Nobody is madder than me that the website isn't working as it should — which means that it's going to get fixed," Obama told a crowd at an outdoor address at the White House.
Since it went into effect at the start of October, the new system's HealthCare.gov website has been the subject of numerous complaints, as many users reported problems creating an account or logging in. Others say they got confusing error messages.
Acknowledging the problems Monday, the president said, "There's no sugarcoating it: The website has been too slow" and people have had trouble navigating it.
The problems were "aggravated" by the high level of traffic to the website, Obama said.
The Guardian
Barack Obama admitted that technical problems had overshadowed his historic reforms to the US healthcare system, acknowledging on Monday that the gateway website "stank" and was a gift to political opponents.With his flagship domestic policy achievement in serious danger of being eclipsed by the three-week IT disaster, the president tried to shore up support for the wider effort to provide affordable healthcare for millions of uninsured Americans by stressing alternative ways to access so-called insurance marketplaces.
But in the most candid admission yet that website glitches were preventing many from signing up, Obama confirmed that a team of outside experts had been brought in over recent days to try to tackle the problem.
"There's no sugar-coating it," Obama said in a speech in the White House Rose Garden. "No one is madder than me that this is not working, which means it is going to get fixed."
The White House has refused to say how many of the nearly 20 million people to visit the main federal website had succeeded in registering with the new insurance exchange. But Obama revealed that officials would be individually contacting all those who abandoned their application over the coming weeks to help them complete the process.
Al Jazeera America
President Barack Obama said Monday there was "no excuse" for the cascade of computer problems that have marred the rollout of key elements in his health care law but declared he was confident the administration would be able to fix the issues."There's no sugarcoating it," he said. "The website has been too slow, people have gotten stuck during the application process, and I think it's fair to say that nobody has been more frustrated by that than I am.”
The president said his administration was doing "everything we can possibly do" to get the federally run websites up and running. And he guaranteed that everyone who wants to get insurance through the new health care exchanges would be able to as the six-month enrollment period continues.
Obama made his comments during an event in the White House Rose Garden that had the feeling of a health care pep rally, with guests applauding as he ticked through what the White House sees as the main benefits of the law.