WASHINGTON — As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama's chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia.
The Times would like to hear from Americans who have begun to sign up for health care under the Affordable Care Act.
HealthCare.gov, the $630 million online insurance marketplace, was a disaster after it went live on Oct. 1, with a roster of engineering repairs that would eventually swell to more than 600 items. The private contractors who built it were pointing fingers at one another. And inside the White House, after initially saying too much traffic was to blame, Mr. Obama's closest confidants had few good answers.
The political dangers were clear to everyone in the room: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Kathleen Sebelius, the health secretary; Marilyn Tavenner, the Medicare chief; Denis McDonough, the chief of staff; Todd Park, the chief technology officer; and others. For 90 excruciating minutes, a furious and frustrated president peppered his team with questions, drilling into the arcane minutiae of web design as he struggled to understand the scope of a crisis that suddenly threatened his presidency.
"We created this problem we didn't need to create," Mr. Obama said, according to one adviser who, like several interviewed, insisted on anonymity to share details of the private session. "And it's of our own doing, and it's our most important initiative."
Out of that tense Oval Office meeting grew a frantic effort aimed at rescuing not only the insurance portal and Mr. Obama's credibility, but also the Democratic philosophy that an activist government can solve big, complex social problems. Today, that rescue effort is far from complete.
The website, which the administration promised would "function smoothly" for most people by Nov. 30, remains a work in progress. It is more stable, with many more people able to use it simultaneously than just two weeks ago. But it still suffers sporadic crashes, and large parts of the vital "back end" that processes enrollment data and transactions with insurers remain unbuilt. The president, who polls showed was now viewed by a majority of Americans as not trustworthy, has conceded that he needs to "win back" his credibility.
Another round of hardware upgrades and software fixes was planned for Saturday night. Administration officials say they will give a public update about the site's performance on Sunday morning.
The story of how the administration confronted one of the most perilous moments in Mr. Obama's presidency — drawn from documents and from interviews with dozens of administration officials, lawmakers, insurance executives and tech experts working inside the HealthCare.gov "war room" — reveals an insular White House that did not initially appreciate the magnitude of its self-inflicted wounds, and sought help from trusted insiders as it scrambled to protect Mr. Obama's image.
After a month of bad publicity and intensifying Republican attacks, the sense of crisis and damage control inside the White House peaked on Oct. 30, as the president's top aides began to fully grasp the breadth of the political challenges they faced. As Ms. Sebelius was grilled by Congressional Republicans that day, Mr. Obama flew to Boston to defend the health law and confront a new accusation: that he had lied about whether people could keep their insurance. Meanwhile, Mr. McDonough huddled at the Democratic National Committee headquarters with a small group of freshman House members whose anxiety was soaring.
The day was a brutal reminder for top White House advisers that fixing the botched health care rollout would be critical to restoring their boss's agenda and legacy. To do that, they would have to take charge of a project that, they would come to discover, had never been fully tested and was flailing in part because of the Medicare agency's decision not to hire a "systems integrator" that could coordinate its complex parts. The White House would also have to hold together a fragile alliance of Democratic lawmakers and insurance executives.
"If we don't do that," one senior White House adviser recalled, "it's a very serious threat to the success of the legislation and a very serious threat to him. We get that."
The urgent race to fix the website — now playing out behind the locked glass doors of the closely guarded war room in Columbia, Md. — has exposed a deeply dysfunctional relationship between the Department of Health and Human Services and its technology contractors, and tensions between the White House chief of staff and senior health department officials. It strained relations between the Obama administration and the insurance industry, helped revive a Republican Party battered after the two-week government shutdown and frustrated, even infuriated, Congressional Democrats.
But as the president's team gathered on Oct. 15 — with a budget deal finally in sight on Capitol Hill — his difficulties were only just becoming clear to the White House. As aides left the Oval Office that evening, clutching notes filled with what Mr. McDonough called "do-outs," or assignments, political pressure was mounting.
Reporting was contributed by Reed Abelson and Sharon LaFraniere from New York, Ian Austen from Ottawa, and Robert Pear from Washington.
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