By Scott Theis, Managing Editor

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” President Barack Obama states while selling the Affordable Care Act to the American people. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a completely false statement. This has only further stoked the fires of a Republican party bent on trying to repeal the President’s signature law, and who are already emboldened by the failures of the new insurance exchanges website.

Trying to backtrack from his now infamous falsehood earlier this month, the President stated, “What we said was, you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.” This, however, is clearly not what the President said previously when he offered zero caveats, period. He did not even change his claim when the Congressional Budget Office projected that up to 10 million people could lose their health care coverage under the new law.

He has even more recently taken a further step to apologize during an interview with NBC News, “I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me.” The President continues, “We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and that we’re going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.” An apology concerning a lie is a rare step for any politician to take, much less a sitting president.

The statement of contrition has comforted some who have lost their coverage, but the failures of the website are still front and center in everyone’s mind. While the White House predicted that roughly 500,000 people would have signed up through the exchanges by now, only about 100,000 have done so or been able to, according to Forbes. The administration has set Nov. 30 as the deadline to have the issues with the website fixed, but most analysts say that is an unrealistic goal.