We did fumble the ball on affordable care: Obama

Admitting his determination to provide affordable healthcare to Americans is facing some serious problems, including a poorly functioning website, US President Barack Obama today assured countrymen he will make sure that the Affordable Care Act works.
"My pledge to the American people is, is that we're going to solve the problems that are there, we're going to get it right, and the Affordable Care Act is going to work for the American people," Obama said at a White House news conference.
He also noted that there is frustration among people on the issue.
"I am very frustrated, but I'm also somebody who, if I fumble the ball, you know, I'm going to wait until I get the next play, and then I'm going to try to run as hard as I can and do right by the team. So, you know, ultimately I'm the head of this team. We did fumble the ball on it. And what I'm going to do is make sure that we get it fixed," he said.

The problems of the website have prevented too many Americans from completing the enrollment process, Obama said.
"And that's on us, not on them. But there's no question that there's real demand for quality, affordable health insurance," he said.

"In the first month, nearly a million people successfully completed an application for themselves or their families. Those applications represent more than 1.5 million people. Of those 1.5 million people, 106,000 of them have successfully signed up to get covered," he added.
Obama said he will not accept proposals that are just another brazen attempt to undermine or repeal the overall law and drag them back into a broken system.

"We will continue to make the case, even to folks who choose to keep their own plans, that they should shop around in the new marketplace because there's a good chance that they'll be able to buy better insurance at lower cost," he said.
Responding to questions, Obama said he was not informed directly that the website would not be working the way it was supposed to.
"Had I been informed, I wouldn't be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I'm accused of a lot of things, but I don't think I'm stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn't going to work.

"So, clearly, we and I did not have enough awareness about the problems in the website. Even a week into it, the thinking was that these were some glitches that would be fixed with patches, as opposed to some broader systemic problems that took much longer to fix and we're still working on them," he said.