President Barack Obama is scheduled to hold a press conference in the Rose Garden to address the Tuesday opening of the health insurance exchanges that are the backbone of the Affordable Care Act, according to C-Span.
Early on Tuesday morning technical difficulties were bogging down the newly launched healthcare.gov as it became evident that the site was not yet prepared to handle the traffic of millions of Americans attempting to purchase health insurance, according to the Washington Post.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hopes that people will be patient with the new system as she compared it to when a tech company introduces a new product with a few bugs still in it, according to the Washington Post.
"No one is calling on Apple to not sell devices for a year or to get out of the business because the whole thing is a failure," Sebelius told reporters. "Everyone just assumes there's a problem, they'll fix it, let's move on... Hopefully, they'll give us the same slack as they give Apple."
The president is also likely to address the government shutdown that took effect on Tuesday after Congress was unable to come to a compromise in order to fund the government. House Republicans refused to pass a bill that did not defund or delay the Affordable Care Act while Democrats in the Senate and the president refused to accept any budget bill that attacked the health care reform law that was passed three years ago, according to the Chicago Tribune.
"The Affordable Care Act is moving forward," President Obama said. "That funding is already in place. You can't shut it down."
President Obama has been clear that he will not budge on the issue since he considers the Affordable Care Act to be a closed issue since it was approved as law three years ago and that including defunding of the law into a budget bill is inappropriate, according to NPR.
"I shouldn't have to offer [the Republicans] anything," President Obama told NPR's Steve Inskeep. "They're not doing me a favor by paying for things that they have already approved for the government to do. That's part of their basic function of government; that's not doing me a favor. That's doing what the American people sent them her to do, carrying out their responsibilities."
The president's press conference is scheduled to begin at 12:25 p.m. ET and a live stream of the event can be seen on C-Span at this link.
