Obama's cares - FT.com .A Tea Party member reaches for a pamphlet titled "The Impact of Obamacare" Opponents of US healthcare reform promise a bitter fight in the coming weeks to defund its implementation. Since President Barack Obama would veto any such step, such efforts will come to naught. But it is troubling that the October 1 deadline for the launch of the key insurance exchanges coincides with the expiry of the US sovereign debt ceiling. Republicans plan to link approval of a higher ceiling to defunding of the Affordable Care Act. Any distractions from rolling out what is already a complex law would be unwelcome. The Obama administration must also be careful to avoid system crashes and other big glitches. Delays of a few weeks here and there would be far better than risking a public relations disaster. For all its plus points, the president's signature reform is facing real teething problems, some of them self-inflicted. Only 16 states have set up their own exchanges, which means the federal government will run the other 34. Following a ruling by the Supreme Court last year, barely half the states have accepted the federal Medicaid funding that was meant to cover a large share of the 52m people in America who are uninsured. And Mr Obama has suspended for a year the new mandate that will compel companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance. Nevertheless the October 1 deadline will mark the formal launch of the US healthcare act. The new exchanges will be the centrepiece of a system that will offer a sliding scale of subsidies to the uninsured to buy coverage. Customers with pre-existing conditions can no longer be turned away by insurers. Annual and lifetime spending caps will be abolished. Every American adult will have to get insurance or pay a penalty. Should it work as designed, there will be cheaper insurance available to a wider pool of people, which is desperately overdue in the US. But with only two weeks before the launch, Washington needs to do a far better job of explaining what is on offer. Under the schedule, people buying insurance will have six months to make a choice. Yet according to the Kaiser Foundation almost half of Americans have never heard of the exchanges and almost three-quarters of those under 30 are ignorant. Since the new plans would not kick in until January 1, a slow initial pick-up is to be expected. But it will require skill and effort to ensure a high response rate before the end of the year. Technical though it seems, the future of Mr Obama's reform could depend on it.