White House buys time for fixing Obama-care website 12:22 AM 27 October 2013 Washington President Barack Obama promised yesterday that his troubled healthcare website was just weeks away from a cure as he struggled to convince Americans he is on top of what has become a self-inflicted wound to his signature first-term achievement. His administration unveiled a plan on Friday to make Obama-care insurance marketplaces on healthcare.gov - a website riddled with error messages, long delays and bugs - work better by the end of November. It was the end to an embarrassing week where Obama discovered he had overshot on an October 1. promise of a website that would make shopping for health insurance as easy as buying “a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon.” “As you may have heard, the site isnt working the way it’s supposed to yet,” Obama said in his weekly yesterday address - an understatement after days of reports of people being shut out of the system. “In the coming weeks, we are going to get it working as smoothly as it’s supposed to,” he added. Obama had stood firm against Republican attempts to defend or delay the healthcare law, known popularly as Obama-care - efforts that led to a 16-day government shutdown this month. He and his top officials had warned publicly before October 1 that there could be “glitches,” but the White House has been scrambling to control the damage from a roll-out that was far worse than expected. The depth of the design flaws has raised questions about why the Obama administration was so insistent on starting the enrollments on October 1 when the system was clearly not ready - and laid bare the president’s mistake in raising expectations about how good the website was going to be. “Either they made assumptions that were too optimistic and were caught off guard, or they knew that the difficulties would be greater than the public understood, but chose not to say so,” said Bill Gals-ton, a Brooking Institution expert who was a domestic policy adviser to Democratic President Bill Clinton. “It may be some of both.” Obama adviser Jeffrey Zients, appointed on Tuesday to figure out how to manage the complicated fixes for the website, was an unannounced participant on a conference call with health reporters on Friday afternoon.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 05:10:02 +0000
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