The Health Insurance Marketplace has been hit with several technical difficulties since its Oct. 1 launch. Is America’s new health care system already broken? No; this is not the case, although opponents of the Affordable Care Act would argue otherwise.

Glitches in the computer systems running the website caused problems for users during the open enrollment period for the marketplace. The glitches are not only due to the massive amount of visitors to the website (about 20 million in the first few weeks,) but instead mostly resulted from late changes to and lack of testing of the website’s registration process.

The website has been slow and people have been booted off while trying to apply. As of Oct. 21, more than half a million Americans have enrolled in the insurance exchange, out of an estimated seven million who need coverage. The deadline to register is March 31, after which individuals will be charged the greater of either 1 percent of their income or $95.

If enrollment continues at the current rate, millions of unregistered Americans will not be able to sign up in time. The government should delay the sign up deadline, because it would not be fair to penalize people for glitches that prevented them from signing up. This would not be the first time that the deadlines have been extended. In July and August, two provisions were delayed until 2015: the employer mandate and the consumer spending limit.

At a Congressional hearing on Oct. 24, the two main contractors, CGI and QSSI pointed fingers at each other and at the federal government, disagreeing on who was actually in charge of developing the website.

In response to mounting public frustration, the Obama administration announced on Oct. 25 that QSSI had now been assigned to lead the initiative to fix the website by Nov. 30.

Despite this, many Republicans as well as some Democrats are calling on the president to extend the open enrollment period. This is a much more moderate approach than completely repealing the law, which is what other Republicans are demanding.

So the website does not work perfectly when it launches, and everyone is up in arms. Are they justified? Technical difficulties are reasonable problems, especially since is a very large website. When is anything perfect on the first try? “Rome was not built in a day,” and neither was this website. Nor will the fixed version be ready in such a short period of time.

The implications of the website’s issues are huge, since people need to have health insurance coverage. However, since Obamacare is arguably President Barack Obama’s lasting legacy, he will make sure that individuals are not harmed by the legislation that should help them. Obama will not allow the law to penalize those who were unable to sign up due to the technical difficulties. That is why he is pushing for an immediate fix.

Most projects do not operate flawlessly at launch, and there is short period in which the wrinkles are ironed out. When major iPhone software updates are released, more updates are released almost immediately after to address reported glitches. The issues with the healthcare website are along similar lines, although with much higher stakes since it deals with health insurance coverage.

Now that Obama has addressed the issues and implemented a plan to fix them, let’s see if he can keep his Nov. 30 promise.