PRESIDENT OBAMA: The last point I'll make is that in terms of expectation setting, there's no doubt that in an environment in which we had to fight tooth and nail to get this passed, it ended up being passed on a partisan basis -- not for lack of trying, because I met with an awful lot of Republicans to try to get them to go along -- but because there was just ideological resistance to the idea of dealing with the uninsured and people with preexisting conditions. There was a price to that, and it was that what was already going to be hard was operating within a very difficult political environment. And we should have anticipated that that would create a rockier rollout than if Democrats and Republicans were both invested in success.



One of the problems we've had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure, and that makes, I think, the kind of iterative process of fixing glitches as they come up and fine-tuning the law more challenging. But I'm optimistic that we can get it fixed. (Wall Street Journal CEO Council, November 19, 2013)