'This law is helping millions of Americans,' Obama says. Obama: 'Armageddon' hasn't arrived

President Barack Obama celebrated the end of the Affordable Care Act’s first open enrollment period by announcing that at least 7.1 million Americans have signed up for insurance through exchanges.

“No, the Affordable Care Act hasn’t fixed our long broken health care system, but this law has made our health care system a lot better,” Obama said before a large and happy crowd Tuesday afternoon in the Rose Garden.


“In these first six months, we’ve taken a big step forward,” he said. “Under this law, the share of Americans with insurance is up, and the growth of health care costs is down.”

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And the critics, he stressed, have been proven wrong: “There are still no death panels. Armageddon has not arrived. Instead, this law is helping millions of Americans.”

While the president did sound like he was enjoying a victory lap for much of his speech, he made clear that some bumps still lie ahead. “I want to make sure everybody understands in the months, years ahead — I guarantee you — there will be additional challenges to implementing this law. There will be days when the website stumbles. I guarantee it,” he said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was on hand, seated in the front row, but did not get a shout-out from the president, though congressional Democrats did. Allies including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Sander Levin and Charles Rangel were in the crowd, as were adviser Valerie Jarrett and National Economic Council Director Jeff Zients, who led the “tech surge” to put HealthCare.gov back on track after its initial troubles.

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For all the fanfare of the Rose Garden speech, White House officials pushed back ahead of time on the notion that the event was a victory lap, even as allies celebrated the numbers. “We are feeling good. It’s been amazing to see the consumer interest and the work that’s been done on the ground,” said Anne Filipic, president of Enroll America. She added: “Yes, I am smiling!”

Even as the enrollment numbers started ticking up, the administration still didn’t feel good about how things were going. Though the administration had anticipated a surge of interest right before the deadline, the level of traffic on HealthCare.gov in the final hours Monday took officials by surprise.

Obama first learned on Monday night that enrollment numbers had surpassed 7 million, but not by hovering over a computer as midnight struck.

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Taking advantage of a warm evening in Washington, Obama turned their nightly “wrap” meeting into another one of their famous walks on the South Lawn — like one they shared late last summer in planning a response to the Syria crisis — shortly after 6 Monday night, the kind that have come at several other critical moments for the president in the past six months.

The numbers were trending strongly, McDonough told Obama. Hitting 7 million was looking like a safe bet. Obama headed up to the residence and didn’t get another official update until Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., when the number had hit 7.04 million and was on the rise.

With the open enrollment period over, the administration turns its attention to implementation, aware of how much Republicans will be looking to make of every hiccup — and how shallow their reservoir of trust and goodwill is with voters and the media.

In his remarks, Obama pushed back against Republicans determined to obstruct the implementation of the law and to repeal it. “Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance? Why are they so mad about the idea of folks having health insurance?” he asked, declaring that “the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.”

But Republicans have made clear they aren’t giving in. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reiterated Monday that he will continue to push to repeal it, as have many others in the GOP. Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said that “despite the White House ‘victory lap,’ this law continues to harm the American people” and called for a replacement of “this fundamentally flawed law with patient-centered solutions that will actually lower health care costs and help create jobs.”

In the coming weeks and months, the administration will push forward with an effort to tout the benefits of the law but does not plan to send Obama out on the road for a heavy selling tour. It’s in part an acknowledgment that there’s little that Obama or anyone else would say or do at this point that would change a significant number of minds, officials said. On the contrary, they believe that keeping the focus on Obamacare rather than turning attention to jobs and the economy would only hurt the president and the Democrats running in the midterms.

While complete enrollment numbers and a demographic breakdown won’t be available for several weeks, administration officials believe they’ll have the support from insurance companies to successfully push back on two of the Republican attacks that have gotten the most mileage of late: that not enough young people have signed up to make the insurance pool viable and that the enrollment numbers far overstate the number of people who’ve actually paid for their plans.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday that the administration expects that the final numbers will also show sharply higher enrollment by young adults, though demographic breakdowns by race or age will not be available for days or weeks, and he was unable to say how many of the enrollees were previously uninsured. The law’s impact on the uninsured, he said, was intended to be measured over three years.

Carney dismissed estimates that 40 percent of all enrollees must be young and healthy for the law to succeed as a “red herring” and added that enough young people had already enrolled to keep Obamacare exchanges stable.

As numbers are tabulated and implementation continues to be closely watched, a “special enrollment” window for people who began the sign-up process but were unable to complete it in time for Monday’s deadline will continue for the next few weeks. People who have gone through major life changes such as a marriage or a job change will also be able to continue to enroll through HealthCare.gov.

Extra time will be available for people who encountered a range of problems, including getting inaccurate health plan information displayed on the website, having an insurer wrongly reject an application, being shunted back and forth incorrectly between the exchange and Medicaid, having unresolved complex family situations and receiving the broadly worded “other system errors that kept you from enrolling.”

Requests will be reviewed, but HHS has said the process of granting extensions will essentially operate on an honor system.

Kyle Cheney and Joanne Kenen contributed to this report.