White House to launch new push to sell ObamaCare after HealthCare.gov re

The Obama administration on Tuesday will launch a campaign to promote the broader benefits of the president's signature health care law, after months of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over HealthCare.gov's technical problems and insurance policy cancellations.

President Obama will pitch the Affordable Care Act at a White House event where he'll be flanked by people who have been helped by the law, according to an administration official.

The president will also take aim at Republican-led efforts to repeal ObamaCare, arguing the GOP is trying to strip away benefits provided under the law without presenting an alternative proposal, the official said.

'Healthcare.gov met our self-imposed November 30th deadline and even as we continue to make improvements to the website, we'll also remind the public about how the Affordable Care Act is already making a positive difference in the lives of millions of Americans today,' White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement.

Obama administration officials acknowledged HealthCare.gov is still a work in progress after a key deadline to fix the problems with the online health exchange. The administration had promised a vastly improved shopping experience on the website by the end of November.

The site appeared to generally run smoothly early Monday morning before glitches began slowing people down. By 10 a.m., federal health officials deployed a new queue system that stalls new visitors on a waiting page so that those further along in the process can finish their application with fewer problems.

About 750,000 had visited the site by Monday night - about double the traffic for a typical Monday, according to figures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The first big test of the repaired website probably won't come for another couple of weeks, when an enrollment surge is expected as consumers rush to meet a Dec. 23 deadline so their coverage can kick in on the first of the year.

Avoiding a break in coverage is particularly important for millions of people whose current individual policies were canceled because they don't meet the standards of the health care law, as well as for a group of about 100,000 in an expiring federal program for high-risk patients.

With the midterm elections less than a year away, it's vital to Democrats that the site lives up to expectations the president set. Republicans have already suggested they'll launch coordinated attacks linking every congressional Democrat up for re-election to the Affordable Care Act.

'President Obama and his administration repeatedly claimed the ObamaCare website would be fully functioning by the end of November, but this has proven to be just another broken promise,' RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Monday. 'The Obama administration had over three years to build Healthcare.gov, and all they've produced is a non-functioning website, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Federal health officials have acknowledged the importance of fixing back-end problems as insurers struggle to process applications because of incomplete or inaccurate data. Even when consumers think they've gone through the whole process, their information may not get to the insurer without problems.

'We do know that things are not perfect with the site. We will continue to make improvements and upgrades,' said Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

news3blog.blogspot.com contributed to this report.