Determine whether or not subsidies are available and the new website design to ensure that consumers are aware they can also apply by phone. The Affordable Care act is not just a website. Its much more. For the vast majority of americans, for 85 of americans who already have Health Insurance through your employer or medicare or medicaid, you dont need to sign up for coverage through a website at all. Republicans wasting no time in attempting to pivot off their disastrous strategy to defund the entire law have been eager to use technical failures as evidence of legislative fiasco. Obama care is indeed a train wreck. A visit to the website is kind of like a trip to the department of Motor Vehicles in your state. Its a failure. You know, the government simply isnt going to be able to get this job done correctly. Even if you were lucky enough, bob, to get on to sign up, you are going to find youve got fewer choices and higher premiums. As of yesterday, 476,000 americans had applied for health care on federal and staterun websites. But the administration has not released data on how many of those applicants have actually enrolled which has prompted the rnc to file a freedom of information act to request the total number of enrollees. At this point, even supporters of reform worry the continued website problems could undermine a law meant to bring Affordable Health dire millions of americans. Speaking to the huffington post, Health Care Expert and law professor timothy jost said if things arent resolved in three weeks weve got some serious, serious problems. I dont think were anywhere close to that yet but if the whole thing collapses it will be another generation before we get this whole thing fixed. Joining me is josh barrow and senior congressional reporter for talking points memo sak saku kapur. And former White House Press secretary robert gibbs. Thanks for joining us. A few weeks ago, maybe it was a week ago time moves very slowly in my world. You said when they get it fixed, i hope they fire some people. Were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work. Your more confident now that youve heard from the president this morning . Well, look. I think theres some good things that are happening. Obviously, a lot of people are in the process of completing applications, and clearly the demand of almost 20 million unique visitors is huge. Thats a great thing. The president was also smart to acknowledge that there are some real problems with the architecture of the website. Both at the front end and they are clearly adding things like call centers, increased call centers, the ability to shop for Health Insurance plans without completing an application. Back end problems as insurers are not getting all of what they need on the back end of this. I think the hardest thing the president has to do is clearly what he was trying to do today and that is, quite frankly, separate health care from this website because i think the personification right now of the Affordable Care act for most americans and certainly to news media thats covering it is in fact the website. And it is, as a piece of communication strategy, its a difficult one. He has to acknowledge the problems but also not let those problems dissuade people from signing up and participating in what is a landmark law. I guess i ask you in terms of the transparency around this, did the president do an adequate enough job of embracing those problems and instilling confidence in the American Public that they will be fixed in time for these deadlines that are just weeks months away . And beyond that, should they be telling people the president tossed out that 20 million figure of visitors. Should they be telling the American People how many people have enrolled . I think i think getting out the number of people that have applications is a good thing. Look. I think we should not necessarily keep score every day on who signs up when because, quite frankly, the most important number is not how many people signed up today. Its how many people sign up by the end of this period. I do think that the it was a very challenging thing today to try to navigate this. And i do think the president was smart to acknowledge that he and others are frustrated by this. And, look, i stand behind it. Somebody should be fired or some group of people should be fired because of this. I dont think that changes, but, clearly, what the most important thing to do is, right now, is figure out how to make this work because the consequence of the president speaking about this and he made a joke about this on the 1800 number. The consequence of the president speaking in the rose garden this afternoon about health care is, now more people are going to go to the website, right . More people are going to go right now to the website. So if it cant handle that spike in traffic in a way thats easier to navigate, it will be then harder ultimately, i think, to get through the message of the great benefits that are in the Affordable Care act of which the president enumerated many. Robert, let me open this up to our folks in new york. Jake, watching the president , i dont think anybody disagrees this is a difficult needle to thread. You hear when one reads about the problems that are plaguing the website, it is not just the enrollment page. We are talking about, if we are reading the wall street journal, which is a big if in some circles, emerging errors include duplicate enrollments. Spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations. Deeper structural flaws here. The president was always going to be held accountable for this. Now that hes come out there in the rose garden and said these problems need to be fixed, how much how much is he on the line for all of this in the coming weeks . I think theres a lesson here about technology. I think hes really at fault. Ive been around some big software projects. We started slate at microsoft and i was there in the late 90s when basically the big software projects kind of stopped working because they were too big and nobody had any control over them. The idea you give this to the Technology People and then as robert gibbs said, we should fire them because it didnt work. I mean, you shouldnt think about it that way. It doesnt work that way. They are too big, too complicated. Its more like invading a country. Dont you i guess to Roberts Point we dont do that well. I would let you respond to this. Just to interject for a moment before we go to you, someone theoretically said at one point, were not going to beta test this, or were not going to do x, y and z. Were going to jog this out to cgi and let them run with it. On that end, someone somewhere made a decision that was a bad decision. The whole thing it wasnt just one bad decision. Or cascade of bad decisions. Architected wrong. Clearly nobody in charge of this process who could manage it. But this is a huge, complicated, difficult process and i guess im disappointed that someone who had pretenses of being the first tech president didnt have his head wrapped around it enough to take those problems on. I think even the president should have known that you beta test a piece of Software Like this. Robert, i would let you respond to that and i would just point out this very strange place that we are in on the tech side as ezra klein wrote this morning. The truth is the Obama Administration to a much greater extent than it would like to be is dependent on the people who built health care. Gov to fix it. They are the only people that know whats going on inside this system. This system is massive. Its dealing with the irs, interface with the Social Security administration, interface with insurers. Not just eric schmidt from google coming in saying, you know what you need to do in rewrite these lines of code. Well, i think that is true. I think, quite frankly, both of those things are true. We are dependent on the contractors we have now. And, you know, one of the reasons with Technology Works so well in the campaign and may not work so well here is we didnt outsource to the Campaign Technology to the lowest bidder. But secondly, i do think, and youve seen this reported, and i think this is smart, there should be a tech surge. There should be not just the best and the brightest in washington, but the best and the brightest from Silicon Valley who make this work every single day. Granted they get a lot of time to do it because they make this work for big, big websites. Those people should be brought in to do triage to get this system working because we dont have an option. This really is ed harris in apollo 13. Failure isnt an option. Failure cant stop. We have to fix it as were doing this enrollment. It all has to be simultaneous, which is going to require a lot of really smart people in the room working on this 24 hours a day. Josh . Yeah, i think were getting ahead of ourselves by trying to allocate blame or figure out how this could be done better next time. The thing needs to be fixed and the Administration Still has more it needs to disclose about what the nature of the problems are. Its not that im so interested in knowing how many have signed up. Im interested in knowing about these back end problems. What we know about these problems in communication between the website and the insurers is from the wall street journal and the New York Times from Anonymous Sources inside Insurance Companies and hhs. We havent had a full accounting of how exactly broken is this thing on the back end. How do they plan to fix it and on what time frame do they think they can fix it. The distinction the president is trying to draw between the website and the product isnt a real distinction. A key way this works is you need to get lots of people to sign up for insurance. These Insurance Markets only work if young, Healthy People get insurance to basically subsidize the people with big Health Problems will be expensive to cover. I think National Review really had this right. They are saying if you have the big problem is not having a website that doesnt work at all. Having a website that works really badly so that its really hard to buy insurance because if you have to try 25 times in a week to get through to buy the health plan, who is going to do that . Not the young, healthy guy. The people with Big Health Care costs and no insurance. Its good that person can get insurance but then the Insurance Market may fall apart if almost everybody who is buying or these people with really high health costs. So i think i would really like to see a little more panic, frankly, from the administration recognizing this is a problem and explaining what their contingencies are for what they will do if they cant get it fixed. And the panic question, i think is a legitimate one. Lets look at the calendar. December 15th is the deadline to get coverage on january 1st. January 1st coverage goes into effect if you signed up by then. February 1st is when the penalties go into effect. March 31st is the end of the open enrollment period. Between february 1 and hst and march 31st if you sign up, you can still be penalized. That is not a lot of time especially when talking about the problems that may be bigger than 5 million lines of code, whatever that means. Structural problems here. And the question is, and i think this is a really unfortunate position, but the whole question of delaying and delaying the mandate and delaying the penalties has become so politicized that even if that is the wise thing to do here, one questions whether the administration can do it. Is it way too much of a concession to republican critics who are going to run in 2014 and 2016, presumably, own this. Its a huge concession and would look awful politically if they do it. But if the website isnt running you cant penalize people for not buying it. Thats why i thing next few weeks and few months will be extremely important and determinative of whether this law exceeds or not. Dare i say the president s legacy is on the line. If enough people dont sign up thenna or, including if they arent young people and Healthy People dont sign up, you immediately get insurers raising prices and then you are into that death spiral where fewer people sign up and costs keep going up and up and up. Thats conone aspect to look at. They project 7 Million People should sign up. Thats another important number. Right now these problems with the website, they are bad. They are really embarrassing. I think the president owned up to them, but at the end of it, i think its going to be the enrollment numbers. We dont know that yet. Thats going to make or break. Robert, to that end, you know, the sort of polit the politics of all this. Theres a piece in the New York Times this weekend that i found deeply disturbing. And that is the flip side of this which is the grassroots campaign, the money that has been poured in by the conservative right to undermine people getting access to health care. And really specifically, they talked about the americans for prosperity campaign. I believe it was headquartered this was they are talking about one piece of the campaign in virginia. But going to the local level, undermining town halls, local officials who were there to decide whether or not to expand medicaid rolls, who are making very tough choices for their constituents and the efficacy and the ruthlessness with which these organizations are operating. You have that narrative happening at the sort of on the ground level. Then the sort of National Perception that the websites are broken, and then potentially, the white house needing to delay the mandate. This is, i think, for fans and supporters of this piece of legislation who understand histor ike how historic it is in nature, its a disconcerting storm system thats gathering. Well, and the key is not to let it become the perfect storm that destroys so many things. I will say the politics of this, nobody should be surprised at the politics of this. The politics of health care reform, of the aca, of obama care have not been any different now than they were in sort of mid2009. So the fact that the Koch Brothers dont want the aca to work is about as surprising as the sun having crested above the horizon in the east this morning. Thats baked into the cake. Let me address one thing i think that josh said. You know, and i do think the well, two things, really. The administration has a huge stake in making this work because, as was mentioned through health economists, if you dont get enough people in this system, the system will collapse. I dont think were anywhere near that point. But theres a builtin mechanism for making this work, and that is the whole thing will either work or wont work because of it. And secondly, and i said this when i originally talked about somebody being fired and that is the experience in massachusetts was that people came to the website on average 18 times before they purchased health care. Health care purchasing is an extraordinarily personal decision. It is a decision thats based on your circumstances, both on what you need through health care, how many dependents you have, how many tax credits you might qualify for. So i do think theres time to get this right. Now one of the things that is concerning for young invincibles, and thats the code name for thats josh barrow. Young and invincible around here. 27plus, they cant stay on their parents insurance. They have to get insurance. Theyll probably get something that amounts to largely a catastrophic policy that if they were to get a horrible debilitating disease or hit by a bus they wont go bankrupt. Those are the people that we have to make sure this thing works for and the question is, are they used to technology that doesnt work . Right . They are the iphone generation, and if the app that they just downloaded doesnt work they delete it and go to a different app. Thats why the website has to work. I was going to say, that is such an important point, robert. This is where sort of behavioral study comes into effect. And the fact that we are trying to reach an inherently digital generation. This application has digital problems among other problems. And how sort of patient are 27yearolds with technology. Im actually inclined to think people get apps on their iphones. Im not a 27yearold invincible, but in this day and age, and id love to know your thoughts on it. If an app doesnt work, ill reload it. If google maps didnt sync well with my iphone its a pain but i need google apps and i go back and reload it. Theres a higher level of tolerance with digital rollouts among a certain part of the American Public. If it doesnt work once or twice, sure. But if the website basically, if theres no good way to buy insurance through it or if it really involves trying over and over and over again for weeks, i think people will quite reasonably eventually give up or say, look, ill come back to this when the thing works. I think people most people if theyre not basically just trolling understand that on some time frame the government can build a working website to sell you a Health Insurance plan. Can they fix it in the number of weeks they have available before it becomes a big problem. I think people will have a reasonable level of patience but if the thing is just not working, theyre not going to keep trying forever. Jake . But thats even the larger issue here which is confidence in governments ability to do anything. Because you have a conservative movement that has been arguing and arguing more strenuously than ever that government cant do anything. And this is characteristic of yet another thing it cant do. Build the website that works. I think when you think in generational terms, the attitude of this younger generation, people in their