President responds to problems with Affordable Care website. Offers temporary solution to continue allowing insurers to offer the same, pre-Affordable Care, policies for another year.

Courtesy of Swampland:

Obama, speaking at the White House, again acknowledged shortcomings with the problem-plagued Healthcare.gov insurance exchange website, but said the reform law is already showing successes, especially with the expansion of Medicaid coverage. 

“I think it’s fair to say that the roll-out has been rough so far,” he said. “There is no question that if the website were working like it’s supposed to, [early enrollment numbers] would be higher. 

“We fumbled the roll-out on this health care law,” Obama said bluntly. 

The president’s announcement partly corrects his infamous promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” at least for a year. Insurers will be allowed to offer those plans, many of which do not provide comprehensive coverage, to existing customers in the individual market for a year, as long as they educate those re-enrolling about the alternatives in the health care law’s insurance marketplaces. 

“I completely get how upsetting [losing insurance] could be for many Americans, especially after they heard assurances from me,” Obama said. “We’re going to do everything we can to help Americans who are receiving these cancellation notices.” 

“There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate,” Obama added. “My working assumption was that the majority of those folks would find better policies and lower costs or the same costs in the marketplaces.” 

Before Obama spoke, a senior White House official said that “insurers can offer customers the option to renew their 2013 plan in 2014 without change, allowing these people to keep their plans.” 

According to senior White House officials, the regulatory solution would remove the need for legislative action that is being pushed by both parties on Capitol Hill. One bill, offered by Republican Rep. Fred Upton, would allow those less comprehensive plans to be sold to new customers. The officials said such a plan “would undermine the Affordable Care Act and the marketplaces.” The White House has been skeptical of any legislative solution, which would quickly become a Christmas tree for amendments to undermine the bill. 

“I will not accept proposals that are just another brazen attempt to undermine or repeal the law,” Obama said. 

I do not see this as much of a solution to the problem, and worry that Obama is simply succumbing to political pressure. 

I watched the President live this morning during the Alex Wagner show, which had Howard Dean on as a guest, and Dean could barely contain his frustration. A frustration that I share by the way,.

However I am not at all sure that the President had much of a choice, especially after Bill Clinton pulled the rug out from under him the other day.

By the way, and not to get all Alex Jones here, but I am having a very hard time not thinking that the website roll out was sabotaged from within. There has already been some good reporting on that here, but I think that might just be the tip of the iceberg.

The President also had this to say about the website glitches:

OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as -- the way it was supposed to. Has 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.

Okay, how is THAT possible that nobody told the President of the United States that he was essentially lying to the American people? That really does not seem accidental, and I get the feeling that he was not the only one who had a vested interest in getting this website operating who was kept in the dark.

You can read the transcript of the speech for yourself here.