President Barack Obama is planning to rally support for ObamaCare and stem a wave of bad publicity over his flagship domestic achievement.
The president was joined at the White House by Americans who said they had benefited from the Affordable Care Act.
The new healthcare.gov website, which sells medical insurance, is now working at acceptable levels after its disastrous launch, says the administration.
The act aims to provide health coverage to some 15% of US citizens who lack it.
Barack Obama sought to remind Americans that under his health programme, insurers can no longer deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, and young people can now stay on their parents’ coverage until age 26.
He discussed the intensive efforts to repair the healthcare.gov website, which has been a flop since it went online on October 1st.
“Today the website is working well for the vast majority of users,” Barack Obama said.
President Barack Obama is planning to rally support for ObamaCare
“More problems may pop up, as they always do when you’re launching something new. And when they do we’ll fix those, too.”
The White House is also due to hold a youth summit on Wednesday, in the latest attempt to promote the law among the young and healthy, a demographic crucial to the strategy of reducing overall healthcare costs.
It is part of a multi-pronged effort by the administration to counter the Republican argument that the act known on both sides of the political divide as ObamaCare is “a train wreck”.
The law’s problems have sent Barack Obama’s job approval ratings plunging and threaten to damage fellow Democrats in next year’s congressional elections.
Elsewhere in Washington DC on Tuesday, the White House’s chief of staff told a public policy forum that more than one million new visitors had logged on to healthcare.gov a day earlier.
Denis McDonough said the website’s new queuing system, used in times of high traffic, worked “pretty well”.
“No matter what, we’re going to see this thing through,” he said.
He did not provide updated figures for how many people had signed up for insurance plans.
The administration aims to enroll 7 million people in insurance plans before the end of March, when all Americans are required to have coverage or pay a fine.
But problems reportedly persist. Insurers say they are receiving enrolment forms that have errors or are duplicated, while others go missing altogether.
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The deadline to overhaul the website of ObamaCare reform law has passed but it is unclear if all the glitches have been fixed.
Technicians worked around the clock to meet the midnight deadline but the site was due to go offline for maintenance early on Sunday.
The test will probably come as people return from Thanksgiving holidays.
Problems with the website have led to a drop in President Barack Obama’s approval ratings.
White House officials said the HealthCare.gov site was working well on Saturday after overnight hardware upgrades to boost its capacity.
Software fixes to improve speed and reduce errors were planned for overnight Saturday into Sunday morning.
An update on the website’s progress is due to be released later on Sunday by Jeff Zients, the site’s chief troubleshooter.
The deadline to overhaul the website of ObamaCare reform law has passed but it is unclear if all the glitches have been fixed
HealthCare.gov is a key element of Barack Obama’s flagship 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – also known as ObamaCare – which aims to provide affordable health insurance to the estimated 15% of US citizens who lack it.
But since its October 1st launch, the site has been plagued by errors, outages and slow speeds.
Despite the setbacks, Barack Obama has described his healthcare reform law as a legacy to be proud of.
In an interview with ABC News, Barack Obama said he still believed his Affordable Care Act would make good on his manifesto promise to deliver affordable health care to Americans.
ObamaCare has been strongly criticized by Republican party politicians and many private health providers, who say it is too expensive and an unwarranted intrusion into the affairs of private businesses and individuals.
Their opposition intensified after the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov in October.
The website, which services 36 states, signed up just 27,000 people in the first month while the 14 states that run their own websites enrolled 79,000.
The total of around 106,000 was far off the administration’s estimate that nearly 500,000 people would enroll within the first month.
The White House promised a “smooth experience” for the “vast majority” of website users by the end of November.
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Only 27,000 Americans enrolled for health insurance through its troubled federal website in the first month, the Obama administration has said.
About 106,000 people were insured in total, most of them through the state-run websites.
The administration originally estimated nearly half a million people would sign up in the first month.
Democrats reportedly expressed frustration about the botched rollout in a White House meeting on Wednesday.
The federal website, used in 36 US states, has been bedeviled by glitches since its October 1st launch.
The administration has pledged that the portal will be “running smoothly” for a “vast majority” of users by the end of November.
Wednesday’s figures from the US health department also showed nearly 400,000 Americans had qualified for Medicaid, a government medical programme for the poor that was expanded by the healthcare law.
Only 27,000 Americans enrolled for health insurance through its troubled federal website in the first month
About 40% of people in this category were said to have come through the federal website.
Nearly one million people, meanwhile, had managed to check via the website if they were eligible for government subsidies towards the insurance, but had not selected a plan, according to the administration.
The White House’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, told a congressional oversight hearing on Wednesday that the system’s response times have improved.
But there is a long way to go – health insurance enrolment thus far is a tiny fraction of the seven million people the Obama administration has projected will sign up by the end of March.
The difficult launch of the website has provided Republicans with plenty of ammunition against the law, which they tried to delay or defund through a partial government shutdown last month.
The White House is also facing harsh criticism over insurance companies’ mass cancellation of policies that do not meet the law’s strict requirements, even though Democratic President Barack Obama had pledged otherwise.
Adding to his political headache, six Senate Democrats are sponsoring a bill that would allow Americans to hold on to their existing coverage. The proposal is entitled Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise.
It is along the lines of a House Republican-sponsored bill, to be voted on Friday, which Democratic leaders have rejected as just another conservative attempt to repeal the law.
Democrats in the House of Representatives met White House officials on Wednesday, reportedly to express their concern that the issue could lead to a backlash in next year’s midterm elections.
An unnamed senior House Democratic aide told US media that legislators had pressed President Barack Obama to announce a fix for the cancelled policies.
The White House is expected to host a visit from Democratic senators on Thursday.
Former President Bill Clinton, a fellow Democrat, on Tuesday urged Barack Obama to find a way to let Americans keep their coverage under the law. Republicans seized on his comments.
Last week, Barack Obama apologized to those whose policies had been cancelled, saying “we didn’t do a good enough job in terms of how we crafted the law”.
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