President says website problems are 'unacceptable"; urges insurance shoppers to keep trying

Oct 22 2013

USA Today: Obama: Health Care Website Problems 'Unacceptable'
President Obama said Monday that problems with the new health care website are unacceptable, but argued that the law overall will benefit millions of Americans. While Healthcare.gov "hasn't worked as as smooth as it was supposed to have worked," Obama said in a White House speech that thousands of once-uninsured Americans have signed up for coverage. Obama said his health care team will reach out to tech experts to fix massive website problems that have hampered the rollout of his landmark piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act (Jackson, 10/21).

NBC News: Obama: Obamacare 'Much More' Than Websites
Joined at the White House by Obamacare applicants and beneficiaries, Obama continued to defend the health law itself despite the online glitches that have hampered enrollment in the new plans. He also encouraged those who want to apply for the program to do so by phone or mail as work on the web site continues. Problems with the online health care site have plagued the administration since the web site's rollout on October 1 (Dann, 10/21).

CNN: Obama: Health Care Website Not Running As 'Smoothly' As Expected 
Problems include people being unable to log on Healthcare.gov as well as issues once they have applied for the health insurance they must obtain by March 31 to avoid a fine.  ... Initial difficulties have started to ease for logging on to the website for the new exchanges, some of which are run by states and others by the federal government. Now problems are occurring further along the process, with insurance industry sources having said they are getting some applications with missing information. Senior administration officials say about 476,000 health insurance applications have been filed through the Obamacare website so far (Cohen, 10/21).  

Politico: Obama Laments Affordable Care Act Glitches
Obama's stance is a significant public relations shift. For weeks ahead of the Oct. 1 launch, the president and his team said it would be as easy to sign up for health care as it is to purchase airline tickets. Now Obama's pitch is the health care law is "working just fine," it just has a balky website that needs to be fixed. ... "I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth and I want people to be able to get this great product," Obama said. "There's no excuse for these problems. These problems are getting fixed" (Millman and Epstein, 10/21).

The Associated Press: For Obama, A Frustrating Health Care Rollout
The first three weeks of sign-ups have been marred by a cascade of computer problems, which the administration says it is working around the clock to correct. The rough rollout has been a black eye for Obama, who invested significant time and political capital in getting the law passed during his first term. The officials said technology experts from inside and outside the government are being brought in to work on the glitches, though they did not say how many workers were being added. Officials did say staffing has been increased at call centers by about 50 percent. As problems persist on the federally run website, the administration is encouraging more people to sign up for insurance over the phone (Pace, 10/20).