as you stay healthy. it doesn t work well when you re sick. so year after year, americans will routinely expose to financial ruin or denied coverage due to minor, preexisting conditions or dropped from coverage altogether even if they ve paid their premiums on time. that s one of the reasons we pursued this reform in the first place. and that s why i will not accept proposals that are just another brazen attempt to underminor repeal the overall law and drag us back into a broken system. we will continue to make the case even the folks who choose to keep their own plans, they should shop around in the new marketplace because there s a good chance they ll be able to buy better insurance at lower cost. so, we re going to do everything we can to help the americans who have received these cancellation notices. but i also want everybody to remember there are still 40 million americans who don t have health insurance at all. i m not going to walk away from 40 million people who have a
but it does mean that people want affordable health care. the problems of the website have prevented too many americans from completing the enrollment process, and that s on us, not on them. but there s no question that there s real demand for quality, affordable health insurance. in the first month nearly 1 million people successfully completed an application for themselves or their families. those applications represent more than 1.5 million people. of the 1.5 million people, 106,000 have successfully signed up to get covered. another 396,000 have the ability to gain access to medicaid under the affordable care act. that s been less reported on, but it shouldn t be. americans who are having a difficult time who are poor, many of them working, may have a disability, they re americans leak everybody else and the fact they are able to get insurance is critically important.
insurance model, the affordable care act, is not going to be getting in the way of you shopping in the individual market that you used to have. now, as i said, there are still going to be some folks who, over time, i think are going to find that the marketplaces are better. one way i described this to i met with a group of senators when this issue first came up, and it s not a perfect analogy, but you know we made a decision as a society that every car has to have a seat belt or air bags, and so you pass a regulation. there s some additional costs, particularly at the start of increasing the safety and protections, but we make a decision as a society that the costs are outweighed by the benefits of all of the lives that are saved.
you can support their efforts. our friends in the philippines will face a long, hard road ahead but continue to have a friend and partner in the united states of america. now, switching gears, it has now been six weeks since the affordable care act s new marketplace opened for business. i think it s fair to say that the rollout has been rough so far, and i think everybody understands that i m not happy about the fact that the rollout has been, you know, wrought with a whole range of problems i ve been deeply concerned about. but today i want to talk about what we know after these first few weeks in what we re doing to improve the law. yesterday i the white house announced that in the first month more than 100,000 americans successfully enrolled in new insurance plans. is that as high a number as we d like? absolutely not.
you hear criticism on the hill that you and your white house team are too insular, is that how this mess came to be? well, i think there s going to be a lot of there s going to be a lot of evaluation how we got to this point. i assure you that i ve been asking a lot of questions about that. the truth is that this is, number one, very complicated. the website itself is doing a lot of stuff. there aren t a lot of websites out there that have to help people compare their possible insurance options, verify income to find out what kind of tax credits they might get, communicate with those insurance