Obama dodges question on whether he will fire HHS Secretary Sebelius

by Erik Wasson - 02/02/14 4:54 PM ET

President Obama in a Super Bowl Sunday interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly dodged when asked point-blank if he will fire embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over the flawed ObamaCare rollout.

“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable, but when we are midstream, Bill, we want to make sure we our main focus is how do we make this thing work so people are able to sign up and that is what we have done,” Obama said.

{mosads}The president claimed that the ObamaCare website, www.HealthCare.gov, is now completely fixed.

“The good news is that right away we decided how we were going to fix it, it got fixed,” he said. “Within a month and half it was up and running and now it’s working the way it is supposed to.”

“I don’t think anybody anticipated rightly the degree of the problems with the website,” Obama admitted.

O’Reilly asked Obama if it was the worst mistake of his presidency to declare that under ObamaCare those who liked their existing insurance would be able to keep it. That turned out not to be case, as the law required insurers to stop offering limited-benefit plans that often cost less.

“This is one that I regret and I said I regretted it,” Obama said, without ranking it in terms of other mistakes.