WASHINGTON - Two weeks into the launch of the federal health insurance exchange, the website is still plagued with problems, leading critics to wonder if the problem is worse than it appears.

There are two key issues at the core of the problem, said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group. One is the volume, which Health and Human Services estimates at 14.6 million unique visitors, and the second is the platform's design.

The main problem, Schuyler said, could be "core fundamental design flow," but it's impossible to know because HHS is saying so little. "Only the contractors and HHS know that," he said.

They need to figure out the problem soon, Schuyler said, if the government is to meet its goal of 7 million new health customers signing up on the exchanges by March 31. "That's 39,000 enrolled a day, and we're not seeing anywhere near that volume," Schuyler said. "If they don't get it fixed within two or three weeks, we may have a backlog of consumers who won't be able to enroll by January 1."

HHS didn't have enough time to test its system for "one of the most complex IT platforms undertaken by the feds or the states," Schuyler said.

HHS did not respond to a request for information, and its website states that there are too many media requests now to answer all of them. However, at the end of the first two weeks, HHS issued a statement:

"We won't stop improving HealthCare.gov until its doors are wide open, and at the end of the six-month open enrollment, millions of Americans gain affordable coverage," said HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters.

President Obama criticized the problems in a Tuesday interview with KCCI, a Des Moines TV station. "I am the first to acknowledge that the website that was supposed to do this all in a seamless way has had way more glitches than I think are acceptable and we've got people working around the clock to do that," he told the Iowa station. "We've seen some significant progress but until it's 100% I'm not going to be satisfied."

Tuesday, Millward Brown Digital released an analysis showing that 36,000 of the 9.47 million people who visited the site the first week made it to the enrollment page at healthcare.gov, with the assumption that only a small percentage of the visitors were able to enroll. HHS has not released enrollment numbers. Millward Brown is an international market-research group.

"I will be the first to tell you that the web site launch was rockier than we wanted it to be,'' HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday morning at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. She did not give an update on numbers, but said people still have plenty of time to enroll before the Dec. 15 deadline for coverage to begin January 1.

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Health care exchange problems continue