President Obama will addresss the botched rollout of the federal health care exchange website on Monday morning.
In a rare move, the Obama administration posted a lengthy blog detailing the technical problems with HealthCare.gov and vowed to address them.
“Unfortunately, the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating for many Americans. Some have had trouble creating accounts and logging in to the site, while others have received confusing error messages, or had to wait for slow page loads or forms that failed to respond in a timely fashion. The initial consumer experience of HealthCare.gov has not lived up to the expectations of the American people. We are committed to doing better,” it read in part.
The blog post said the team was bringing in the “best and brightest” minds to fix HealthCare.gov, in what was dubbed a ‘tech surge.’
Since Healthcare.gov went live on October 1, users have encountered a myriad of problems while trying to register and to choose an insurance plan. Insurance providers have also reported receiving faulty and duplicate customer information.
Appearing on Meet the Press Sunday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew admitted the rollout was flawed and said that the administration was working to smooth out the system’s kinks.
“There’s no one more frustrated than the president at the difficulty in the website,” he said.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also expressed frustration about the site on Sunday, calling the tech glitches “unacceptable” during an appearance on ABC’s This Week. But, she argued, an error-prone system is still better than a system that left tens of millions of Americans without any health insurance.
“What doesn’t have to be fixed is the fact that tens of millions of more people will have access to affordable, quality health care,” she said.
On Saturday, the AP reported that 476,000 people had begun applications for insurance in the three weeks that the health care website has been active.
Meredith Clark
Meredith Clark is a freelance writer and editor. She was previously a senior news producer for "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj," a reporter with MSNBC.com, the digital politics and culture editor at Glamour and a senior news and politics editor at Refinery29. She has written for Vulture, Rolling Stone, Self, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Beast and Bustle.