President Obama aims to rally support for healthcare
US President Barack Obama will attempt to rally support for his healthcare law and stem a wave of bad publicity over his flagship domestic achievement.
He will be joined soon by Americans who have benefited from the Affordable Care Act, according to the White House.
The new healthcare website, which sells medical insurance, is now working at acceptable levels after its disastrous launch, says the administration.
The act aims to provide health coverage to some 15% of US citizens who lack it.
At 14:30 local time (19:30 GMT), Mr Obama will seek to remind Americans that under his health programme, insurers can no longer deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, and young people can now stay on their parents' coverage until age 26.
He will discuss the intensive efforts to repair the healthcare.gov website, which has been a flop since it went online on 1 October.
The White House is also due to hold a youth summit on Wednesday, in the latest attempt to promote the law among the young and healthy, a demographic crucial to the strategy of reducing overall healthcare costs.
It is part of a multi-pronged effort by the administration to counter the Republican argument that the act known on both sides of the political divide as Obamacare is "a train wreck".
The law's problems have sent Mr Obama's job approval ratings plunging and threaten to damage fellow Democrats in next year's congressional elections.
'Floodgates are open'
Elsewhere in Washington DC on Tuesday, the White House's chief of staff told a public policy forum that more than one million new visitors had logged on to healthcare.gov on Monday.
Denis McDonough said the website's new queuing system, used in times of high traffic, worked "pretty well".
"No matter what, we're going to see this thing through," Mr McDonough said.
He did not provide updated figures for how many people had signed up for insurance plans.
The administration aims to enrol seven million people in insurance plans before the end of March, when all Americans are required to have coverage or pay a fine.
But problems reportedly persist. Insurers says they are receiving enrolment forms that have errors or are duplicated, while others go missing altogether.
"So far we've been able to deal with these issues because there's been relatively low volume," Daniel Durham, of industry lobby group America's Health Insurance Plans, told Reuters news agency.
"But now that the floodgates are open… we're going to see a lot more volume and health plans just don't have the personnel to do all [the technical fixes] manually."
On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor accused the administration of trying to cover up the law's problems.
"What else are they hiding?" he told a news conference.
"While the White House wants to claim that healthcare.gov is now working, we know that Obamacare is still plagued with problems and every American deserves relief from it."
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