And he urged Americans not to give up on Obamacare, even if they were frustrated by HealthCare.gov.

Standing in the Rose Garden three weeks into the rocky launch, Obama lamented the difficulties with the Obamacare website, while ticking through the law’s benefits that don’t rely on online sign-ups.

“Yes, the website really stank for the first week,” Obama read from a letter he’d received from someone who applied for coverage.

( Obamacare guide: POLITICO’s guide to the ACA)

Obama’s new pitch is the health care law itself is “working just fine.” It just has a balky website that needs to be fixed — and will be fixed, he said.

“Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed,” Obama said.

Much of Obama’s pitch centered on the guts of the law, rather than its online front door. He said there was no “sugarcoating” the tech problems, but he predicted that people will be patient in order to access health care they wouldn’t otherwise get.

“The essence of the law, the health insurance that’s available to people is working just fine,” Obama said. “The problem has been that the website that’s supposed to make it easy to apply for insurance hasn’t been working. The website has been too slow, people have been getting stuck during the application process.”

Obama said he has called for a “tech surge” to get HealthCare.gov running up to speed. He again advertised the government’s toll-free phone number as a way people can sign up while HealthCare.gov does not function as promised.

( WATCH: 7 quotes on Obamacare glitches)

“I want the cash registers to work, I want the checkout lines to be smooth and I want people to be able to get this great product,” Obama said. “There’s no excuse for these problems. These problems are getting fixed.”

Obama made a direct pitch to his Democratic supporters in Congress and elsewhere. He sought to remind them that his fight for health care — going on five years now — was to extend affordable health benefits to Americans who hadn’t had them. That’s a goal Democrats had pursued for decades.

“With the website not working as well as it needs to work, that makes a lot of supporters nervous,” Obama said. “But we did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a website. That’s not what this was about.”

Obama called the website’s well-documented errors “unacceptable” and tried to assure the American public that a crack team of technical experts is working around the clock to do what shouldn’t be so remarkable in 2013: build a functioning website.

The timing of Obama’s health care event, three weeks after the law’s disappointing launch, is an acknowledgement that the administration can’t maintain its Obamacare bunker mentality much longer. With the government shutdown and near-fiscal calamity now off the front pages, Obamacare opponents are primed to highlight all the law’s stumbles, starting with a congressional hearing this week.

The law’s supporters hoped this would be Obamacare’s moment to shine, when the years of bitter fighting in Congress, the states and the courts were supposed to fade away as Americans started signing up for health coverage.

Instead, the administration’s effort to extend affordable health coverage to millions of people devolved into a national punch line about government incompetence. At first, the administration blamed the website problems on huge traffic to the site, a sign of high public interest in Obamacare coverage. That explanation has been dropped as the depth and intensity of the technical obstacles have become evident. One tech expert told The New York Times that as many as 5 million lines of code may need to be rewritten.

The administration said it has brought in the “best and brightest” from inside and outside government for website triage. HHS officials late Sunday night also announced consumer-friendly changes so people can steer clear of the website aggravation. They can comparison shop health plans more easily now, or use a paper application or the call center to sign up.

But everything that has happened with HealthCare.gov is a far cry from Obama’s frequent assurances that buying Obamacare coverage would be as easy as purchasing a plane ticket with a few online clicks.

What’s still unknown, however, is the timetable for establishing a smooth online enrollment experience. People still have another five months to sign up for coverage, but Democratic allies are already nervous that pervasive glitches could damage their 2014 narrative.

If people want — or need — coverage by Jan. 1, they need to enroll by Dec. 15. It’s not clear how well the site will be working by then or how much capacity there is for the offline enrollment options.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been asked to appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Oct. 30, when committee Republicans intend to grill her about the technical challenges facing the Obamacare enrollment system. That hadn’t been finalized Monday evening, but Sebelius did offer to testify next Wednesday after declining to appear this Thursday, when several of the contractors who built the enrollment system are expected.

For all the frustrations with HealthCare.gov, some people have made it through the application process — and the White House highlighted some of those stories Monday. The administration, as part of its weekend Obamacare messaging offensive, announced that 476,000 people submitted applications for health coverage since Oct. 1, and about half of the applications came from 36 states where the feds are running the online insurance marketplaces.

The White House refuses to announce until next month, however, just how many people have successfully completed enrollment in a health care plan. That number is likely to be lower than hoped, considering that insurers say they’ve received faulty information from the federal government even after someone makes it all the way through the enrollment process.

Even after this weekend’s tech update, the administration has been typically tight-lipped about the depth of problems at the Obamacare website and efforts to address them. White House spokesman Jay Carney on Monday refused to provide further details about who specifically has been brought in to solve the website problems, referring questions to HHS — which has also refused to provide specifics.

Former White House health care adviser Zeke Emanuel on Monday called on the White House to provide daily briefings and specific milestones to illuminate efforts to repair the Obamacare website.

“Reassurance verbally is not worth much at this point,” Emanuel said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”