President conceded that government-run IT is inefficient, but said glitches hard to fix when 'one side of Capital Hill invested in failure'

Barack Obama admitted on Tuesday that the task of rebranding his troubled healthcare reforms will be challenging because of the partisan nature of Washington politics, with Republicans "invested in failure".

Speaking before an audience of business leaders, the president acknowledged he had underestimated how fierce opposition would prove to be, after forcing the Affordable Care Act through congress with only Democrat votes.

“We should have anticipated that [the ideological resistance] would result in a rockier roll-out than if Republicans and Democrats had both been invested in success,” he told the Wall Street Journal conference. “One side of Capital Hill is invested in failure and that makes the iterative process of fixing glitches as they come up and fine-tuning the law more difficult. We are going to have to rebrand and re-market and that will be challenging in this political environment.”

In the latest of a series of mea culpas over the troubled launch of an online exchange for health insurance, Obama also admitted the government's record in delivering complex computer projects should have rung alarm bells earlier.

“There is a larger problem that I could have identified,” he added. “The way the government does procurement and IT is generally very inefficient. There is probably no bigger gap with the private sector than the way we do IT.”

However, Obama continued his recent efforts to diversify support outside Washington with a direct appeal to corporate financial interests. “The thing that hasn't been talked about a lot is cost and that affects the bottom lines of everybody here,” he said. “Over the last three years we have seen healthcare costs grow at the slowest rate for 50 years and that's saving us money.”

On Monday night, Obama reached in the opposite direction with a direct appeal to 200,000 grassroots supporters from his election campaign for their help in bolstering health reform, but neither strategy has yet succeeded in overcoming what is fast becoming the biggest political test of his presidency.

Earlier on Tuesday, the latest in a series of hearings in Congress produced more testimony suggesting that remaining technical problems with the website were substantial.

Henry Chao, a top official in charge of managing the construction of healthcare.gov, revealed that the section of the healthcare web site that processes subsidy payments to insurers might not be built until mid-January. Only 60% to 70% of the back end of the web site has been built and incomplete functionalities include "the back office systems, the accounting systems, the payment systems," Chao told the hearing.

Efforts to show the positive results of health reforms suffered another blow when CNN reported that a woman used by the White House to demonstrate insurance savings during a launch event in the Rose Garden had now been told her premiums would go up.

After initially writing a heartfelt thank-you letter to the White House, Jessica Sanford said she received another letter informing her the Washington state health exchange had miscalculated her eligibility for a tax credit.

Speaking in Florida, health and human services secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday encouraged people to return to the HealthCare.gov website, promising them a better experience. "It is far faster than it was when we first opened," Sebelius said, in remarks reported by Reuters. "The error rate is down to less than 1% and the volume capacity is continuing to be added to."

With opinion polls suggesting Obama's approval ratings have slumped to their lowest level yet over the affair, it may take more than speeches to business leaders and campaign supporters to help overcome the political damage from such high-profile setbacks.

But Obama also received a rare vote of support from a prominent Republican during the WSJ conference as New Jersey government Chris Christie, a front-runner for the party's 2016 nomination, said Obama should be allowed to govern. "He just won [re-election] a year ago, and as we shove him out the door, we minimize his ability to be an effective executive," Christie said.

The moderate Republican also mocked those in is party who led the fight to de-fund the Affordable Care Act and led to a 16-day federal government shutdown.

“[Republicans] just did not have an endgame to a strategy,” said Christie. “Since Obamacare is still currently being funded and the government is re-opened, maybe I’m too simple, but it appears to me that the strategy of de-funding it by closing the government failed.”