Carney on Low ObamaCare Enrollment: Romney Faced the Same Thing

CUOMO: "All right, and we know that there are a lot of people around who may have been entertaining it, that's the intrigue of politics and I say let's move on to the matters of the people's business at hand, Jay. The numbers about early returns of who is signing up with ObamaCare are terrible. That's just how it is, they're very low. The real question is how are you going to handle not getting to critical mass which is the key to making this affordable, ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, that's the affordable piece, is this pool of coverage. What do you do if you don't get the numbers you need?"
CARNEY: "Well, first of all, we are going to get the numbers we need. We believe we're going to get the numbers we need. We have a six-month open enrollment period for that reason. Look, the numbers that have been cited in these reports are from notes and by definition, when you have a website that isn't functioning well, you're going to have problems and we've owned up to that repeatedly. This is a, nobody is more upset than my boss, the President of the United States, with the fact that the website hasn't been working well, and that's why he's made sure that we have really smart people, extra eyes, extra brains on this problem working 24 hours a day to improve the user experience. When it comes to low numbers early in the enrollment stage I think we have to look at Massachusetts, which under governor Romney introduced health care reform plan very similar to what the President has introduced here and in their first month of enrollment only 123 people enrolled for premium paying plans in Massachusetts. In the end they had massive enrollment towards the end of the enrollment period so we always expected enrollment figures to be low. We were saying that before October 1st. Obviously the website problems have made it worse but that's why we're working every day because the website is just a means to an end. The end here is getting affordable health insurance to Americans who haven't had it in the past."