Even as President Obama vowed on Monday night to defend his signature health reform law, there was fresh evidence in the Congress that Democrats are feeling the heat about the law and Mr. Obama's familiar pledge that if you like your health insurance, you could keep it.
"The President said over and over, if you have insurance, and you like the insurance you have, you can keep it," Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) said on the Senate floor, taking a hard line over the President's repeated assurance to voters that his health reform law wouldn't wipe away the coverage they liked.
The speech by the Louisiana Democrat came just minutes after President Obama had told supporters at a Washington, D.C. event that he is not backing off the goals of his reform effort, no matter the complaints about the details.
"I've got one more campaign in me; the campaign to make sure this law works for every single person in America," the President said to cheers at a Washington fundraiser.
"I need your help to implement this law, I need your help to educate folks about this law," the President said over loud applause, his voice kicking back into the familiar cadence of the campaign trail.
During his speech, the President again tried add a caveat to his insurance pledge, adding on a new phrase.
"Now if you had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan," the President said, "what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed."
That seemed unlikely to slow some of the attacks on the line which has come back to bite the President.
Back on the Senate floor, while Landrieu certainly wasn't giving any hints at all that she was ready to abandon the health law, though the Louisiana Democrat - who is up for re-election in 2014 - she did make clear she thinks some changes are needed.
"But we recognize that there are some pieces of it that need to be fixed or tightened or tweaked," said Landrieu, who read some of the health insurance cancellation letters which have gone out to Americans in recent weeks.
While Landrieu officially introduced her bill - which she titled the "Keeping the Promise Act," referring to the President's promise that if you liked your coverage, you could keep it - there was certainly no guarantee it would ever be voted on, as Senate Democratic leaders have shown no hint of moving to undercut the President's health law.
Landrieu said she has one Democratic co-sponsor for her measure, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has already endorsed the idea of a one year delay in the individual mandate, as well as a delay in the enrollment deadline for insurance coverage.
Other Democrats certainly could join her in the Senate in the days ahead.
Landrieu's remarks came just hours after another unplanned outage at healthcare.gov; officials later told reporters that they still weren't sure what had gone wrong, but that the site had been restored within 90 minutes.
The Department of Health and Human Services also announced that healthcare.gov would be down from 1 am to 5 am Eastern Time each day to allow for more hardware and software changes to fix the site.
On an afternoon conference call that went over work to make repairs on healthcare.gov, an HHS spokeswoman initially refused to let reporters identify a top official from the main contractor in charge of the site, as he gave a review of the latest outage and the work to make things work more smoothly.
But after a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, Kathleen Hennessey, protested the "on background" restriction, reporters were allowed to identify Andrew Slavitt, a QSSI Vice President who had testified in October before Congress.
