between the administrative problems of the rollout, the technical problems of the website issues and the quality of the care that the white house says the that americans will receive. those are two distinctly different points. really they have about three weeks to get these fixes worked out, get these bugs worked out and then, you know, they should be out of the woods by then. you would think. time is of the essence, obviously. we all know october 1st was coming and certainly those in charge of the aca knew that october 1st was coming. so is there a certain irony here with an aspect being to make obama care more palatable for republicans? states needing to set up their own exchanges? there were so many states that did not bother to do this, that the onus was on the federal government. right. well, in a lot of ways, this was designed in such a way that states would have the opportunity to do things according to their own specifications, but the moment that that opened up the door
showing your friends how to sign up because it is worth it. it will save you money. if you don t have health insurance if you have a pre-existing condition it will save you money and it will give you the security that your family needs. in fact, even with the website issues, we ve actually made the overall process of buying insurance through the marketplace a lot smoother and easier than the old way of buying insurance on your own. part of the challenge here is that a lot of people may not remember what it s like to buy insurance. the traditional way. the way we ve set it up, there are no more absurdly long application forms. there s no medical history questionnaire that goes on for pages and pages. there s no more getting denied because you ve had a pre-existing condition.
lifted. now, that is not untypical for a lot of folks like jessica who have been struggling without health insurance. that s what the affordable care act is all about. the point is, the essence of the law, the health insurance that s available to people, is working just fine. in some cases, actually, it s exceeding expectations. the prices are lower than expected and the choice is greater than we expected. but, the problem has been that the website that s supposed to make it easy to apply for and purchase the insurance is not working the way it should for everybody. there s no sugarcoating it. the website has been too slow, people are getting stuck during the application process. and i think it s fair to say that nobody is more frustrated by that than i am. precisely because the product is
sooner. we ve got people working overtime 24/7 to boost capacity and address the problems. experts from some of america s top private sector tech companies who, by the way, have seen things like this happen before, they want it to work. they re reaching out, they re offering to send help. we ve had some of the best i.t. talent in the entire country join the team and we re well into a tech surge to fix the problem. and we are confident that we will get all the problems fixed. number four, while the website will ultimately be the easiest way to buy insurance through the marketplace, it isn t the only way. even as we redouble our experts to get the site working as well as it s supposed to, we re also redoubling our efforts to make sure you can still buy the same quality, affordable insurance plans available on the marketplace the old fashioned
to update the software on your iphone. this is serious stuff. not ready for prime time. originally they said the problem was simply that so many millions of people were going online and they didn t anticipate the demand that was out there. that s why the system backed up. was there truth to that? yeah. so it s a combination of a lot of traffic, about 4.5 mil yon people trying to access the website as well as software bugs. that s a stronger word than glitches. some of which, by the way, have been fixed over the weekend. and i m sure the president will allude to that. we re talking about a combination of a lot of traffic, software bugs, and you know, just bad timing. bad timing for a project that is considered, you know, president obama s most important domestic achievement. let s bring sanjay gupta in