United States President Barack Obama was the first to point out malfunctions in his much anticipated addition to the health insurance marketplace, “Obamacare”, available to Americans since Tuesday.
Obama told Americans, “like every new law, every new product rollout, there are going to be some glitches in the sign-up process along the way that we will fix,” reports NBC News .
One of these problems is a lagging website, which Obama attributed to the unprecedented amount of visitors in it’s first hours on the market. Over one million people visited the website before 7 a.m. on Tuesday, five times the number of Medicare.gov’s total visitors in it’s entire existence.
Obama said, “This demand exceeds anything we expected [...] That gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of people around the country,” quotes The Huffingon Post .
Either a result of the website glitches or the vast criticism surrounding Obamacare, The Washington Post reports that very few have actually signed up for the new health-care plan.
“We are talking single digits,” said an anonymous official whose company is offering plans under The Affordable Care Act.
Whether this is a sign of a long-term problem of attracting Americans is difficult to say in Obamacare’s first days. The White House stresses that glitches are being fixed promptly and those who have been unable to sign up in its first hours have until March 31, 2014.