April 1 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about the just over 7 million people that enrolled for insurance coverage under Obamacare. 
 
 This afternoon President Obama, with a grinning Vice President Biden behind him, announced in the White House Rose Garden that sign-ups for his signature health law had exceeded original projections. 
 
 Some 7.1 million Americans have signed up for Obamacare, the president said, by far exceeding the revised projection of 6 million insured after the disastrous roll out of the HealthCare.gov website in October. 
 
 The president was clearly enjoying delivering the news: "This law is doing what it's supposed to do," he said. "It's working. It's helping people from coast to coast." He seemed bemused by the continuing efforts of Republicans do undo the legislation. "Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance? Why are they so mad about the idea of people having health insurance?" 
 
 Republicans were quick to jump on what a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner called Obama's "victory lap." "This law continues to harm the American people," said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel. "Every promise the president made has been broken: healthcare costs are rising, not falling. Americans are losing the doctors and plans that they like – especially seniors suffering under President Obama’s Medicare cuts. Small businesses are afraid to hire new workers, hobbling our economic growth. That’s why we must replace this fundamentally flawed law." 
 
 But Obama had already brushed off such criticisms. 
 
 "Many of the tall tales have been debunked. There are still no death panels. Armageddon has not arrived. Instead this law has helped millions of Americans. The debate over repealing this law is over. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay." 
 
 Here's what some reporters, supporters and critics were tweeting during his remarks: 
 
 WASHINGTON (AP) _ Obama: 7.1 million Americans sign up for health care, despite lost weeks at the start. — Phil Elliott (@Philip_Elliott) April 1, 2014 
 
 The Biden faces behind Obama = priceless. — Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) April 1, 2014 
 
 All of Obama's examples of the poor getting healthcare coverage could have happened by expanding previous programs not ending the good ones. — Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) April 1, 2014 
 
 Obama quotes letter from person who got insurance: "I felt like a human being again." Reminder of how rotten it is to be afraid. — Amy Davidson (@tnyCloseRead) April 1, 2014 
 
 Every time Obama comes out to try to defend #Obamacare his high-pitched squealing voice tells me he's desperate — Jim Lockwood Show (@jimlockwoodshow) April 1, 2014 
 
 The happy mood at the White House now that 7.1 million people have enrolled in Affordable Care Act via @cparsons http://t.co/aj9LpWA4AF — Maeve Reston (@MaeveReston) April 1, 2014 
 
 Obama warns ACA opponents "history is not kind" to those who seek to block progress — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) April 1, 2014 
 
 Spoiler: No. MT @chucktodd: Politically aggressive speech from POTUS. Will D's running in tough races borrow same rhetoric on the trail? — Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 1, 2014 
 
 "There will be days when the website stumbles. I guarantee it," @BarackObama says, will be front-page news for media. Snap. — Charles Ornstein (@charlesornstein) April 1, 2014 
 
 This is Obama's "Mission Accomplished" speech. Take a picture. — Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) April 1, 2014 
 
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 Twitter: @robinabcarian 
 
 robin.abcarian@latimes.com ||||| President Obama today heralded more than 7 million sign-ups for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act -- bringing to a close a politically bruising six-month enrollment period and a first major test for his signature legislative achievement. 
 
 The 7.1 million who have signed up, the president said in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, "despite several lost weeks out of the gate because of problems with the website." 
 
 “Even more folks want to sign up,” he added. “7.1 million – that’s on top of the more than 3 million young adults who gained insurance under this law by staying on their family plan.” 
 
 The latest tally represents the total number of Americans who selected health plans through state and federal marketplaces created by the law since Oct. 1. 
 
 The number is expected to grow as last-minute applications filed through 23 state-run insurance exchanges are counted and people continue to complete applications in the federal exchange into April. 
 
 Obama noted that many of the “tall tales” opponents have told about the law have been “debunked.” 
 
 “There are still no death panels,” Obama said to laughter. “Armageddon has not arrived.” 
 
 Obama added, “The debate over repealing this law is over. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay." 
 
 The 7-million figure has become a symbolic and political milestone since the administration embraced it as a “goal” in mid-2013 based on a projection by the Congressional Budget Office. Reaching that mark is a noteworthy feat after the significant, high-profile technical glitches and website outages that plagued the enrollment process on HealthCare.gov from beginning to end. 
 
 In his statement, Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden, declared: "We've taken a big step forward." 
 
 Still, the number says little about the extent to which the health law has expanded coverage to the uninsured or will stabilize premiums. The administration does not yet know how many previously uninsured Americans gained coverage under the law. They also do not know the ratio of young and healthy enrollees to old and sick -- a key data point insurers watch to set their premiums. 
 
 "We have none of that breakdown data at this point,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said today. However, “we already know that that breakdown is sufficient to ensure that the marketplaces will effectively function, that issuers will feel comfortable with the demographics,” he said. 
 
 Officials also cannot say how many of the 7 million applicants have paid their premiums to finalize enrollment. 
 
 Nevertheless, Obama said, “This law has made our health care system a lot better -- a lot better.” 
 
 Meanwhile, Republicans continue to blast the law. 
 
 "All across the country our constituents are having an unpleasant interaction with Obamacare,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.. “Whether they can sign up for a policy or not, they are discovering, of course, higher premiums, a higher deductible.” 
 
 Public support for the Affordable Care Act narrowly notched a new high in the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll, while criticism of Barack Obama’s handling of the law’s rollout -- although still substantial -- has eased from its peak last fall. 
 
 Americans split on Obamacare: 49 percent support it while 48 percent oppose it. But last November just 40 percent supported it while 57 percent opposed it. 
 
 "I think I'm like a lot of people who end up waiting till the last minute,” Caroline Mays, 30, of Washington, DC, told ABC News as she signed up for an Obamacare insurance policy late Monday. “But now I'm all squared away. I have health insurance. I've been working independently so I haven't had coverage. So this is a big relief to me, for sure.” 
 
 Senior administration officials credit grassroots organizing and a social media blitz, drawing on lessons from the 2012 election campaign, with fueling a last-minute surge in sign-ups. 
 
 They say groups have held more than 5,000 events over the past 6 weeks, including appearances of Obama cabinet officials at 45 of those. They say their social media reach touched 350 million twitter followers and 33 million online video views. 
 
 Privately, the White House points to what they call two pivotal moments in their campaign: A promotional video by NBA star LeBron James, who they say spurred other celebrities to help spread the word; and, the president’s “two ferns” interview with comedian Zach Galifianakis, which generated significant buzz. 
 
 “I have a lot of friends who've been uninsured and have kind of been winging it,” said Sarah Leonard, who enrolled for a new health policy on Monday. “But I know that that's not very responsible, especially at 26, you have to get responsible. I was going to try to wing it but then there's also the tax penalty and I really didn’t want that either.” 
 
 Most Americans were required to obtain health insurance by March 31 or face a fine of the greater of $95 or 1 percent of household income above $10,150 for an individual. Those subject to the fine will pay it on their 2014 federal income taxes. 
 
 As for the politics of the Affordable Care Act, administration officials say the focus now shifts to making the case against repeal. They note that no Democrat that originally voted for the ACA has flipped his or her vote – a sign, they say, that if implemention of the law is continued effectively, then the intensity of debate will wane. 
 
 Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are vowing to intensify the drumbeat for repealing the law ahead of the November midterm elections. 
 
 "House Republicans will continue to work to repeal this law and protect families and small businesses from its harmful consequences,” said House Speaker John Boehner. “We will also continue our work to replace this fundamentally-flawed law with patient-centered solutions focused on lowering health care costs and protecting jobs.” 
 
 ABC's Shushannah Walshe contributed reporting. ||||| Democrats aren’t running through the halls of Congress with their hair on fire yet, but anxiety over the possible blowback from the federal health care law is growing by the day. 
 
 Between the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov and the fact that millions of Americans are poised to lose their current health insurance coverage at the end of the year despite a promise from President Barack Obama that they would be able to keep their plans “no matter what,” congressional Democrats are scrambling to cover their hides before next year’s midterm elections. 
 
 A handful of Senate Democrats have leapt to support a proposal from Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, who's facing a tough re-election campaign in 2014, that would allow Americans with already existing insurance plans to keep them even if they don’t meet the quality guidelines established by the Affordable Care Act. 
 
 
 
 House Democrats on Wednesday held a closed-door meeting with White House officials, where some members vented frustration with the administration over the law's handling and demanded a solution by the end of the week. 
 
 
 
 Republicans, not surprisingly, are working to leverage the Obamacare problems for political gain. 
 
 In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Landrieu suggested that she had been misled when she voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2010. 
 
 "When we passed the Affordable Care Act, we did so with the intention that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it," she said. "A promise was made, and this legislation will ensure that this promise is kept." 
 
 It's hard to see how that would be the case, given that millions of Americans at the time who were insured on private plans held policies that did not meet the minimum requirements set by the law. (Many Republicans at the time warned that this would be a consequence.) 
 
 So far, Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Dianne Feinstein of California have co-sponsored Landrieu's proposal. Hagan, Merkley and Pryor are up for re-election next year while Feinstein and Manchin are not. 
 
 
 
 On Wednesday, another lawmaker facing re-election in 2014, Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, introduced his own legislation that would allow Americans facing cancellations to keep their current plan for up to two years. 
 
 Landrieu and Udall's cause received a kick-start earlier this week when former President Bill Clinton, who has long advocated in favor of the health care law, said he thought the law should be changed to let people keep their current plans. 
 
 View gallery ." FILE - In this Dec. 5, 2012 file photo, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is seen on Capitol Hill in Washin … 
 
 “I personally believe — even if it takes a change in the law — the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,” Clinton said in an interview with the website Ozy.com. 
 
 These new Democratic efforts to “fix” Obamacare, however, could actually prove disastrous for the law. 
 
 The Department of Health and Human Services has already struggled to persuade people to sign up for insurance plans through the federal exchanges. Despite Obama’s oft-repeated promise, allowing people to keep their existing plans could suck millions of potential customers out of the exchanges — customers the law relies on to remain sustainable. 
 
 Neither the White House nor Senate Democatic Leader Harry Reid have taken a position on the Democratic senators' proposals. 
 
 On Wednesday, Reid said he planned to hold a rare Thursday meeting with all Senate Democrats and White House officials to consider the new proposals. Reid declined to comment on anything related to health care during his weekly press conference, saying he would have more details after Thursday’s meeting. 
 
 At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney said the president is looking into “options.” 
 
 “The president has instructed his team to come up with options for him to review,” Carney told reporters on Wednesday. “And you can expect a decision from him and announcement from him sooner rather than later on options that we can take to address the problem that we've been discussing here with regards to those individuals who have had their individual insurance plans cancelled because of the transition to the Affordable Care Act marketplaces." 
 
 Senate Republicans appeared positively gleeful about the Demorats’ efforts to change the law. 
 
 Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested he would not support Landrieu’s bill if it came for a vote. 
 
 “We think the thing ought to be repealed and replaced entirely. We think it can’t possibly work,” McConnell said. “And I’m somewhat suspicious about red state Democrats who are up in ’14 trying to promote some way out of their political dilemma. If they really want to fix Obamacare, they will join with us, repeal it and start over step by step to deal with the problem, which was the number of people uninsured.” 
 
 In the House, Republican Rep. Fred Upton, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has unveiled his own proposal to allow people to stay on their current plans. House Republican leaders have scheduled a vote on the bill for Friday, and it is expected to pass with at least some Democratic support. 
 
 Meanwhile, House Republican committee chairmen continue to hammer away at federal officials and private contractors responsible for the law's implementation. 
 
 The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday, for instance, hauled in IT specialists working to fix the website for a hearing about their progress. 
 
 Under questioning, the panel reported that the federal government had already spent “north of $600 million” on the project as of late September and even more during the repair process. 
 
 "The site is getting better week by week,” said Todd Park, the White House’s chief technology officer for the Office of Science and Technology Policy. “Some days are better than others." ||||| House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), left, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) published op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post on Wednesday calling for President Obama to come to the negotiating table — but neither mentioned the Affordable Care Act as an item to be discussed. (JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS) 
 
 Key GOP figures on Wednesday sent their clearest signals that they are abandoning their bid to immediately stop the federal health-care law — the issue that forced the government to shut down — and are scrambling for a fallback strategy. 
 
 Republican Party leaders, activists and donors now widely acknowledge that the effort to kill President Obama’s signature initiative by hitting the brakes on the government has been a failure. The law has largely disappeared from their calculus as they look for a way out of the impasse over the shutdown and for a way to avoid a possible default on U.S. debt. 
 
 Instead, they are regrouping for a longer battle over the health-care law. They also are trying to refocus the upcoming debt-ceiling showdown on fiscal issues, including entitlements and tax reform. 
 
 The strategy to defund the Affordable Care Act “needed a Plan B, and its authors, if they had one, didn’t share what it was,” said Heather R. Higgins, head of the Independent Women’s Forum and founder of a coalition of conservative groups seeking repeal of the health-care law. 
 
 The push to defund the legislation has cost Republicans politically. A Gallup poll released Wednesday found that only 28 percent of Americans view the Republican Party favorably — down 10 percentage points since September, and the lowest number for either party since Gallup began asking the question in 1992. 
 
 View Graphic How the shutdown affects departments 
 
 Democrats took a smaller hit in the survey, with 43 percent of respondents viewing Obama’s party favorably, down four percentage points from last month. 
 
 Some Republicans are aiming harsh recriminations toward those who had vigorously advocated linking the funding needed to keep the government operating to the drive to stop the health-care law. Freshman Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who has become the face of that strategy, is the chief target of such criticism from within GOP ranks. 
 
 “I think it was very possible for us to delay the implementation of Obamacare for a year until Cruz came along and crashed and burned,” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist said. 
 
 But Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said: “The American people remain behind the defund effort. Americans deserve negotiations. They don’t want Obamacare. Public opinion is behind this, and that should be enough for Democrats to come to the table and provide relief for all Americans.” 
 
 House Republican leaders — who had been backed into the shutdown strategy by demands from Cruz and tea party forces — have been trying to recalibrate since the shutdown began Oct. 1. 
 
 The latest signs of the shift came in editorial columns Wednesday by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in The Washington Post and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in the Wall Street Journal. 
 
 Both implored Obama to negotiate the debt ceiling — but, tellingly, neither mentioned the health-care law as an item to be discussed. Instead, they focused on entitlements, and Ryan wrote that there are many potential areas of agreement between Obama and the Republicans. 
 
 The president has expressed a willingness to negotiate on long-term fiscal problems, but only if Republicans first vote to reopen the government and remove the threat of a federal default. 
 
 On Tuesday, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) also made no mention of the health-care law when he delivered a statement on the shutdown and the Oct. 17 deadline to raise the debt ceiling. 
 
 Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck insisted that Republicans have not given up on their demand that concessions on the health-care legislation be part of any deal to reopen the government. He acknowledged, however, that the demand has shifted from defunding the law — the original rallying cry — to a much narrower goal of delaying a requirement that uninsured individuals obtain coverage. 
 
 Some of the most influential players in the conservative movement also were taking pains Wednesday to maintain their distance from the shutdown strategy, while reaffirming their opposition to Obamacare. 
 
 The chief lobbyist for Koch Industries sent a letter to Capitol Hill offices saying the company’s owners — heavyweight conservative donors Charles and David Koch — have never publicly supported the defund strategy, despite assertions by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and other Democrats to the contrary. 
 
 “Koch believes that Obamacare will increase deficits, lead to an overall lowering of the standard of health care in America, and raise taxes,” Koch lobbyist Philip Ellender wrote. “However, Koch has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the [spending bill needed to keep the government open] to defunding Obamacare nor have we lobbied on legislative provisions defunding Obamacare.” 
 
 One major Koch-funded organization, Americans for Prosperity, has emphasized potential problems with the law but has kept its distance from efforts to defund it and from the shutdown strategy. 
 
 “We see this as a long-term effort,” said Tim Phillips, executive director of the group, which plans to resume a $6 million ad campaign against the law. “We think this effort continues into the fall of 2014 and even beyond.” 
 
 The Affordable Care Act’s online insurance exchanges have gotten off to a rocky start this month, and polls show the law remains unpopular. 
 
 Many GOP pollsters and strategists sharply criticized the push to defund the legislation as it gathered steam this summer, preferring a less confrontational approach that would build on public doubts about the law and focus on delaying its implementation. 
 
 The idea was that flaws in the legislation would become more apparent over time and that the continuing debate would motivate conservatives to vote in the 2014 midterm elections. 
 
 Now that plan is in tatters, and party and movement leaders are trying to salvage something from what is widely acknowledged to be a politically disastrous few weeks. Instead, many strategists say, the stumbling rollout of the law has been overshadowed by the shutdown and a perception that Republicans have overreached. 
 
 “There is a strong sense of a missed opportunity,” Norquist said.
– With an official count of 7,041,000 signups under ObamaCare—a number expected to grow as final tallies are made—President Obama enjoyed what both ABC and NBC called a "victory lap" in the Rose Garden today. "Many of the tall tales have been debunked," he said. "There are still no death panels. Armageddon has not arrived." The president said he doesn't understand why so many were "so mad about the idea of people having health insurance," but they better get over it, because the law is working "and it's here to stay." Another person who used the term "victory lap" was John Boehner, but he did so in criticizing Obama for celebrating a law that "continues to harm the American people," reports the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, Dave Weigel at Slate dubs "Confused Arkansas Guy" as the newest ObamaCare victim. That's thanks to a new ad funded by the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity group in which a man complains not that his policy has been canceled, but that it's now surrounded in a confusing "haze" because of the new law. "It was taken away from us, or it was given back to us, or it was taken," he says. A main target is Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor.