Sebelius has struggled to walk back the president's messages. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Sebelius hearing: More bad news

Kathleen Sebelius got through the latest Obamacare hearing Wednesday, but her message to Senate Democrats was a bit of a downer: Expect more bad news.

The Health and Human Services secretary told the Senate Finance Committee that the Obama administration is on track to fix the sputtering federal enrollment website. Well, maybe not on track exactly — “not where we need to be.”


And she warned the committee that the first enrollment numbers, to be released next week, will be low. The administration has been saying that all along, but given the severity of the website’s troubles, it may be impossible to set the bar too low.

Sebelius again struggled to walk back President Barack Obama’s promises that “if you like your plan, you can keep it,” as Republicans blasted away at the administration’s credibility now that people with individual insurers are getting cancellation notices.

( PHOTOS: 10 Sebelius quotes about Obamacare website)

Here are the takeaways from Wednesday’s hearing:

1. Sebelius bets it all on “fix the website”

Every time there was a pointed question — why don’t you take the website down, how are you going to take care of people who need coverage Jan. 1 — Sebelius’s answer was always the same: We’re just going to fix the website.

By the end of the month, Sebelius said, the website should be “working smoothly for the vast majority of users.”

That set a clear goal for the Obama administration, but it also raised the risks considerably if it can’t declare the website fixed by then — because it’s increasingly clear that there’s no backup plan.

When Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) asked why the administration wouldn’t just shut down the website for a couple of weeks and “get it done right,” Sebelius said the experts — both inside and outside the administration — tell her that wouldn’t do any good.

( Understanding Obamacare: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA)

“We’ve been advised that you don’t gain that much by taking the site down for a week or two. It’s better to do this on an ongoing basis,” Sebelius said.

She also said administration officials discussed that possibility early after the launch, but the experts “have done a series of diagnostics … and determined from the outset that HealthCare.gov is fixable. It’s not fatally flawed.”

Sebelius kept up the “we’ll just fix it” mantra even when Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) asked about an especially urgent problem: how to help people who need health insurance by Jan. 1, especially if their old policies are being canceled. They’ll have to sign up by Dec. 15 for the coverage to take effect at the beginning of the year, and that’s just a couple of weeks after the administration says the website should be working smoothly.

Sebelius boasted about the workarounds, saying there are now 12,000 call center representatives who “can take a consumer through the entire process, from start to finish.” But the main goal, she said, is still the same.

“Step No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 is really to get the website fixed as quickly as possible,” Sebelius said.

( PHOTOS: Sebelius testifies on Obamacare rollout)

2. They may already be falling behind

For someone who bet so much on a successful “tech surge,” though, Sebelius acknowledged that the rescue effort right now is “not where we need to be.”

It was an almost offhand comment, but it could prove to be significant toward the end of the month if the administration still isn’t ready to declare the website fixed.

Sebelius told Baucus there have been “a couple of hundred functional fixes that have been identified,” and that there has been “priority grouping” for the most important ones — especially the reporting problems that have left insurers unsure whether they’re getting the right information on their new customers. Jeff Zients, the former Obama administration economic adviser who is running the repair operation, has called the list of repairs a “punch list.”

And Sebelius said there has been real progress, especially in making the site run faster and making sure customers are “seeing far fewer error messages and timeouts.” But she hinted she still wasn’t satisfied.

“I would say we’re into the list. We’re not where we need to be. It’s a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list,” Sebelius said.

3. Democrats can’t settle on a message

If you needed any reminder of how painful the Obamacare rollout has been for Democrats, all you had to do was listen to them veer back and forth between scolding Sebelius and throwing her softballs — never quite finding the right mix.

Baucus, whose warning of a possible implementation “train wreck” has become the Republicans’ favorite catchphrase, said his words had been twisted — but he also said the Obama administration’s pratfalls in launching the website have been “unacceptable.”

Baucus insisted he wants the law to work — but he also insisted that the Obama administration has to be more straight with Congress.

“You’ve got to tell us what the problems are,” said Baucus. “The more you don’t tell us, the greater the problem is going to be. The more you do tell us, good or bad, the better the chances are that we’re going to get this right.”

Other Democrats sent mixed messages, too.

“There’s no words to even describe the frustration that all of us have,” said Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. But then she fed Sebelius a series of easy questions about a cancer patient in Michigan whose insurance barely covered any of her bills — all designed to show how the new Obamacare insurance rules will help vulnerable people.

“Will Judith or anyone else face caps on their cancer treatment?” Stabenow asked.

“No,” Sebelius answered.

“Will Judith or any other women be charged more than men for their coverage?” Stabenow asked.

“No,” Sebelius answered again.

4. Republican strategy: Hit Obama’s credibility

From the start of the hearing, Republicans pounded away at Obama’s “if you like your plan, you can keep it” pledge — knowing there’s no way to defend it through all the waves of cancellation notices.

Sebelius doubled down on the administration’s line that Obama was talking about the “grandfather clause” in the law, which protects individual health insurance plans that were in place in March 2010 — when Obama signed the health care law — and haven’t changed much since then.

“The president’s promise was written into the law from Day One, and that was the grandfather clause,” Sebelius said.

But since the problems are confined to the individual market — where many plans have either changed too much to keep their protected status, or people bought them after March 2010 — Sebelius couldn’t give a quick, clear answer when Republicans demanded to know why the cancellation notices are coming. She had to explain the whole thing, or at least try to.

“I can tell you that for the vast majority of Americans” who get their health insurance through the workplace, government health programs like Medicare or other sources, like the Department of Veterans Affairs, “their plan is very much in place,” Sebelius said.

For the rest, she said, “there is change coming in the individual market, and they will have protections and benefits that they’ve never had before.”

That wasn’t good enough for the committee Republicans. “There weren’t any caveats on that at the time. It’s not like there were any asterisks or footnotes,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota.

And when Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho reminded Sebelius of Obama’s pledge that Americans’ health insurance costs would go down — and insisted that individual health insurance premiums under Obamacare are higher than those people used to pay — Sebelius had to rely on another wonky answer: They’re lower than what the Congressional Budget Office had expected.

“Are you saying individual premiums are going down?” Crapo asked.

“I didn’t say they’re going down. I’m saying they’re lower than were predicted,” Sebelius said.

5. Next target: Security problems

Hatch made it clear that the next big wave of criticisms will focus on security problems with the website — especially after The Heritage Foundation disclosed this weekend that a North Carolina man who applied for coverage got a downloadable eligibility letter addressed to two people in South Carolina.

“Not only can millions of Americans not log into the website successfully, but those who have actually succeeded could now find themselves at the mercy of identity thieves across the globe,” Hatch said.

Sebelius, however, said no one warned the administration that potential security risks were so severe that they should delay the launch — not even the Mitre Corp., which handles security for the website. She said Mitre “did sign off on going live.”

“There are risks that go with every system that go live, and we took those risks very seriously,” Sebelius said. But “no one, I would say, suggested that the risks outweighed the importance of moving forward.”