Obama says healthcare website ‘actually starting to work’

President Obama said Monday he was encouraged by progress the administration had made toward fixing the Web portal for his signature healthcare law, declaring that HealthCare.gov was “actually starting to work pretty well now” during a fundraiser in Beverly Hills.

Obama reiterated that he was “not happy about the fact that we didn’t have a website that worked on the day it was supposed to work,” but said the website would continue to improve “in the coming weeks.”

The comments at the Hollywood fundraiser echoed remarks Obama made earlier in the day during a speech on immigration in San Francisco. There, Obama said that enrollments in California proved “the law works” even as the administration is scrambling to get “this darn website up to speed.”

{mosads}The president is optimistic despite administration officials cautioning Monday that some visitors to the website will continue to experience outages, slow response times or try-again-later messages after the self-imposed deadline at the end of the month.

“The system will not work perfectly on Dec. 1, but it will work much better than it did in October,” said Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokeswoman Julie Bataille.

Earlier Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said there has been “steady improvement” in the speed of the website, and that it should be prepared to handle 50,000 concurrent users by the end of the month.

That was the original goal of the website, which collapsed after being inundated with interest during its opening weeks. The administration estimated that as many as a quarter of a million people were attempting to simultaneously access the website during the days immediately following the launch.

To prevent a similar flood from overwhelming the system after its relaunch, Earnest said that the administration had created a “queuing system” for times of intense demand.

If more than 50,000 users are attempting to access the website, users can either wait to be granted access or choose to receive an email notifying them that traffic has died down. Those users will be given a link putting them at the front of the line to access the website.

Earnest said the improvements would “significantly enhance the consumer experience on the website.”