President Obama addressed the nation Monday about technical glitches with the Affordable Care Act website, Healthcare.Gov, calling the initial problems unacceptable, and that it will soon be rectified, The Associated Press reported.
The president acknowldeged that the health care law's website "hasn't worked as smoothly as it was supposed to work," but urged Americans not to be deterred from registering for it.
"The Affordable Care Act is not just a website. It's much more," he said. "Nobody's madder than me that the website's not working like it should, which means it's going to get fixed."
The rollout of the healthcare exchanges are perceived as an embarrassment to the administration, since the passage of the healthcare law has been its signature legislative achievement, news reports said.
Flanked by Americans already signed up to the Affordable Healthcare law, Obama discussed the steps the administration is taking to address the web site's failures.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has said that it is "bringing in technology experts from inside and outside of government to help diagnose the issues," The AP also reported.
HHS also said it was putting things in place " "tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them," according to its memo.
The Affordable Care Act was instituted on October 1.
The White House said that about 19 million people have visited the web site HealthcCare.gov since October 1, and some officials blamed that high volume on the site, which may have caused some of its glitches, The AP also reported.
Obama speech at the Rose Garden follows a 16-day government shutdown, in which politicians in the House and Senate spent time bickering over a budget deal, an impasse caused largely by conservatives who sought ways to defund the healthcare law.
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