Obama apologizes for healthcare insurance pledge

'BURNED' BY HEALTHCARE.GOV

Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas and nine other Republican senators wrote to Obama on Thursday, asking him to "immediately relieve" Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from her post because of Obamacare's problems.

Asking in the interview whether he still had full confidence in Sebelius, Obama said the former Kansas governor "has done a great job" in setting up the plan "under tremendously difficult circumstances."

"Kathleen Sebelius doesn't write code," Obama said, expressing frustration with information technology (IT) problems and procurement policies.

"She wasn't our IT person. I think she'd be the first to admit that, if we had to do it all over again, that there would have been a whole lot more questions that were asked, in terms of how this thing is working," he said.

A powerful oversight committee in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has asked top Obama technology officials to testify about the website problems at a hearing on Wednesday.

During the interview, Obama said he had "been burned" by the dysfunctional website, but he said he has resisted firing anyone for the problems.

"Ultimately, the buck stops with me," he said. "You know, I'm the president. This is my team. If it's not working, it's my job to get it fixed."

He said "bureaucratic" and "cumbersome" federal rules for hiring IT contractors often result in waste and cost overruns and pledged to bring rules "into the 21st century" once the website was fixed.

"In some ways, I should have anticipated that just because this was important and I was saying this was my top priority. And I was meeting with folks once a month telling them, 'Make sure this works,'" he said.

FRIDAY: THE ECONOMY

On Friday, Obama will travel to the Port of New Orleans to talk about exports and jobs, and will attend Democratic party fundraisers in Miami.

The White House will also use the trip to try to highlight that residents of Louisiana and Florida are being hurt by the decisions of their governors to turn down an expansion of Medicaid, a government health insurance program for the poor and some people with disabilities. The expansion is a key plank of Obamacare.

"In 24 states, governors and legislatures are blocking this expansion, which means, in clear and stark terms, that they are actively denying coverage to the 5.4 million uninsured Americans who would otherwise gain access to coverage by 2016," White House aide David Simas told reporters.

In Florida, there are 848,000 uninsured residents who could gain access if Republican Governor Rick Scott agreed to expand Medicaid, Simas said. In Louisiana, such a move would benefit 265,000 uninsured people, Simas said.