President Obama has embraced his role as the nation’s most famous salesman, pitching his namesake health care reform law to uninsured Americas and seeking to convince them that problems with Obamacare — chief among them a faulty website — will be fixed.
The president will continue that effort on Tuesday afternoon. He is scheduled to address both problems with the law and the administration’s efforts to fix them during a speech at the White House at 2:30 p.m.
Mr. Obama’s comments will come two days after the White House’s self-imposed Dec. 1 deadline to repair the troubled HealthCare.gov website, the law’s central hub which has been plagued by bugs, glitches and delays since its launch more than two months ago.
The next few weeks represent a crucial period for the administration, as Americans who want health insurance by Jan. 1 must sign up by Dec. 23. Central to that effort is a fully functional website capable of handling surges in online traffic over the next few weeks, as many Americans are expected to wait until the last minute to sign up.
“There are obviously those who are trying and want to enroll and want to make sure their experience is vastly improved,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Monday.
He stopped short of declaring “mission accomplished” in terms of the administration’s task of fixing HealthCare.gov.
“Using that phrase is not one I would employ,” Mr. Carney said. “We were able to make the necessary improvement to the website so that the vast majority of Americans who use the website have an experience in which the site functions effectively.”
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The Obamacare website saw heightened traffic on Monday, with nearly 400,000 Americans visiting the site between midnight and noon, the White House said.
Despite improvements, some of those users still were placed into a “queue” system and asked to return later during off-peak hours.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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