WASHINGTON — President Obama is replacing the 12 Days of Christmas with the 20 Days of ObamaCare.
The president kicked off a three-week PR marathon to promote the troubled health-care law with a White House speech Tuesday, saying the botched Web site “clouded the fact that there are a whole bunch of people who stand to benefit.”
The White House will stage a similar event each day to highlight benefits of the national health plan until Dec. 23, the deadline to sign up for coverage to take effect Jan. 1.
“We’ve learned not to make wild promises about how perfectly smooth it’s going to be at all times,” admitted Obama, who was flanked on stage by Americans he said had already benefited from the law.
He urged people to return to the repaired Web portal to sign up for a plan.
The White House events are part of a coordinated push by the Democratic National Committee and Democratic lawmakers to improve the image of ObamaCare, which was horribly damaged by the Web site fiasco.
The publicity blitz follows the administration declaration of victory Sunday claiming the site was working better than ever.
Still, technical woes persisted,
The Web site had earlier generated errors on a third of the enrolment applications, sending bad information to the insurance companies that likely invalidate the policies, according to the Washington Post.
Another problem surfaced in the program for awarding refundable tax credits for health plans.
The system has security holes and deficiencies in spotting fraud, according to a review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general.
The site has experienced increased traffic since its relaunch.
More than a million visitors perused the site Monday. Another 380,000 logged on by noon Tuesday, without triggering a queueing system for people to wait to enter the site, said the administration.
The multitude of problems with ObamaCare — which include millions of people losing their current health plans — has hurt Obama’s poll numbers and undermined his second-term agenda.
The daily ObamaCare pep talk is supposed to turn that around.
“We’re not going to walk away from it,” vowed Obama. “If I have to fight another three years to make sure it works, that’s what I’ll do.”
He also slammed Republicans for continuing to oppose the law and challenged them to come up with their own legislation.
Republicans fired back that the PR campaign was a stunt.
“Another campaign-style event won’t solve the myriad problems facing consumers under ObamaCare,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“The American people have been learning about the impact ObamaCare will have on individuals and families in the form of higher premiums, disrupted insurance, and lost jobs — more broken promises from the administration,” he added.
“And they’re becoming increasingly aware of the fact ObamaCare is broken beyond repair.”