As Obama defends Affordable Care Act, bugs remain for troubled website

President Barack Obama on Tuesday defended the troubled Affordable Care Act portal HealthCare.gov, saying it is the only way toward an insurance system that can adequately cover all Americans.

In a short speech, he said the site now works for the vast majority of people who use it, but he urged the people to be patient with the site's problems.

"We've learned not to make wild promises about how perfectly smooth it's going to be at all times," Obama said. "Do not let the initial problems with the website discourage you, because it's working better now, and it's just going to keep working better over time."

But many are still noticing bugs that could continue to complicate enrollments before the Dec. 23 deadline, when Americans must have enrolled if they want coverage by Jan. 1.

Facing its first big test since officials proclaimed over the weekend that they had achieved their goal of making HealthCare.gov run smoothly for the vast majority of users, the site performed markedly better than it did during its disastrous launch two months ago — but was still short of the crisply running insurance marketplace Obama once touted.

By 5:30 p.m. on Monday, the website had logged 750,000 visitors, the White House said, nearly the 800,000 daily users the refurbished site is supposed to be able to handle.

In states such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Texas and North Carolina, the rush of traffic led to the deployment of a new feature on the site, a waiting page that said there were "a lot of visitors right now" and put people in line for service, usually within minutes. By Monday evening, officials reported that the site was running smoothly, with no waiting.

That was significant progress for a website that has become the face of one of the biggest crises of Obama's administration, one that has undermined the Democratic president's promotion of an activist government and threatened to become a drag on Democrats in next year's elections, when control of Congress will be at stake.

But HealthCare.gov's hiccups on Monday fueled questions about whether it will be able to enroll several million uninsured and underinsured Americans in private insurance plans by the end of March.

For all of the efforts by tech specialists to improve the site, officials are still scrambling to repair and install functions on the back end of the system that are needed to finalize enrollments with insurers. That could create another headache for the administration starting in January if the enrollments for some who sign up for coverage via the website are not finalized before their coverage is supposed to begin.

"The real challenges remain, and that's downstream," said Rick Howard, research director for technology consultant Gartner. "The real error rate will be in the billing transactions and how accurate the billing information is and how accurate the premium calculation is."

Al Jazeera and Reuters