Obama to meet tech executives Tuesday on HealthCare.Gov: White House

[December 17, 2013]  WASHINGTON (Reuters) — U.S. President Barack Obama will meet executives from leading technology companies like Google and Apple on Tuesday to discuss ways to improve the functioning of the health care website, HealthCare.gov, the White House said.

A White House official said the meeting would cover capacity issues with HealthCare.gov which has not worked well since its since its October 1 rollout.

Many people who have had their private insurance plans canceled face a December 23 deadline to get signed up in order to have insurance on January 1.

It was unclear what Obama might learn from the technology company CEOs that have had little to do with healthcare, but appearing with some of the biggest tech executives in the country could help convince Americans that Obama can fix the healthcare website's problems.

Obama's job approval rating has tumbled to around 40 percent in the face of a host of problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

The meeting will include executives such as Apple's CEO Tim Cook, Twitter's Dick Costolo, Google's Eric Schmidt and Faceook's Sheryl Sandberg, among others.

Others include Netflix's Reed Hastings, Comcast's Brian Roberts, AT&T's Randall Stephenson and LinkedIn's Erika Rottenberg.

The meeting will also include discussion of issues to do with the impact on technology companies of surveillance by the National Security Agency in the wake of the unauthorized intelligence disclosures made by former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Jeff Mason; editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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