Deadline arrives for President Obama's promise to fix Obamacare website

Susan Walsh/AP

The White House has been focused intently on Saturday's deadline, with aides and contractors working to fix persistent problems. President Obama (pictured) says that he believes Americans will eventually appreciate the health care reform.

It's D-Day for Obamacare.

The deadline beckons Saturday for President Obama's promise to fix the troubled HealthCare.gov website, after a month-long invasion of techie repairmen.

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The White House is focused intently on the deadline, with scores of aides and contractors straining to deal with what have continued to be persistent problems.

There have been improvements. But recent days have seen new site outages, a high error rate and some elements, like the Spanish-language section, still not even online.

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The site is used in 36 states to shop for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. But the gap so far is huge between those who tried out the site and those who have actually been able to sign up for new health plans.

New York is one of 14 states operating its own site.

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Publicly, the administration is taking a low-key approach and did not have formal comment Friday. On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the agency overseeing the site said it hoped it would work for 'the vast majority of users' by Saturday.

But even she conceded it's likely the site will continue to be afflicted by outages and frustrating load times.

In theory, the government believes that by Saturday the site can handle 50,000 users at the same time and as many as 800,000 visitors per day.

In an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters broadcast Friday night, Obama said he thinks Americans eventually will appreciate the health care reform.

'I continue to believe and (am) absolutely convinced that ... people are going to look back at the work we've done to make sure that in this country, you don't go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security,' he said. 'That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.'