Obamacare in need of ‘rebrand’ effort, president says

As problems pile up, President Obama said Tuesday his signature health-care reform law needs a full-blown rebranding effort.

“I am confident that the model we’ve built, which works off the existing private insurance system, is one that will succeed. We’re going to have to, A., fix the website so everybody feels confident about that. We’re obviously going to have to remarket and rebrand and that will be challenging in this political environment,” the president told leading CEOs at a gathering hosted by the Wall Street Journal in Washington.

But as troubles continue at HealthCare.gov and reports of Americans being booted off insurance plans and faced with higher premiums grow in number, a remarketing effort may not be good enough.

Mr. Obama acknowledged there are deeper problems, specifically with the website and the federal government’s ability to handle complex high-tech challenges.

“There is a larger problem … the way the federal government does procurement and does IT is, just generally, not very efficient,” Mr. Obama said. “In fact, there’s probably no bigger gap between the private and public sectors than IT.”