Are you sure it's going to be fixed within weeks, Mr. President? This is Obamacare website riddled with garbled messages today

Healthcare.gov 'is not firing effectively on all pistons,' White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Thursday, in what may be the understatement of the week.

When MailOnline visited the website shortly after Carney's daily briefing, the Obamacare portal spewed a nonsensical mixture of computer code instead of a typical login screen.



Gone were words like 'Username' and 'Password.'

In their place were jumbled programming strings like '???ffe.ee.myAccount.login.username???' and '???ffe.ee.myAccount.login.password???'



Garbage in, garbage out: Healthcare.gov's code was so garbled at one point that some users were met with unintelligible text when they tried to sign up for insurance coverage

The worst job in Washington: Jay Carney has to face reporters daily and fend off questions about the malfunctioning website attached to the White House's central policy objective

Carney insisted, though, that the website will work properly for 'a vast majority' of Americans by November 30, the administration's latest drop-dead project completion date.

The White House, he said, has 'acknowledged forthrightly and directly that this is not functioning as it should.'



In a Senate hearing on Wednesday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said technicians were working through a 'punch list' of urgent repairs and had already identified 'a couple of hundred functional fixes' that need to be made.

Consumers continue to use the site with varying levels of success while its code is being rewritten.

'Two weeks ago, the tech team put into place enhanced monitoring tools for HealthCare.gov, enabling us to get a high-level picture of the marketplace application responding, and to measure how changes improve user experience on the site,' Sebelius said during her opening statement.

But the user experience appears to be getting worse, not better.



Seeing double: Some parts of the Obamacare website are now sending users the same information more than once -- on the same page

The Obamacare website's login screen should look like this -- and did, four hours earlier

While the secretary was testifying, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokeswoman Julie Bataille was conceding to reporters that 'the site is performing slowly,'

'Some users have difficulty logging in, and receive error messages,' she said, according to The New York Times.



Sen. Max Baucus, one of the Obamacare law's early drafters, pressed Sebelius to have her ducks in a row before month's end.



'You said recently that you expect the website to be running smoothly for a majority of users by late November,' said the Montana Democrat.



'There is no room for error. You must meet – and I prefer you beat – that deadline.'

Sebelius said Thursday that the government is doing its best to have the website ready by Nov. 30 -- just two months later than originally promised

President Obama and most other Democrats have downplayed the impact of the website's catastrophic rollout, insisting that there are other parts of the Obamacare law whose implementations have gone more smoothly.



Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin called the totality of the law 'a machine' during a reporters' conference call on Thursday.

'The health-care law, the Affordable Care Act, is more than just a website,' he insisted.



'It's a whole new regime, a whole new value system of how we do health care in America. One part of it is the website.'

Sebelius said Wednesday that the initial Obamacare enrollment numbers, which the administration is scheduled to release in eight days, are 'likely to be quite low, given the struggles that people have had getting access to the site and getting information.'