Stressing that improvements are happening daily, the senior Obama official closest to the administration's malfunctioning health care website apologized Tuesday for problems that have kept Americans from successfully signing up for coverage.

Medicare Chief Marilyn Tavenner will be questioned Tuesday by the House Ways and Means Committee not only on what went wrong with HealthCare.gov, but also whether lawmakers can trust Obama administration promises to have things running efficiently by the end of November.

Contractors who built the web portal for the Obama administration's health insurance marketplace said Thursday the site's crippling problems trace back to insufficient testing and changes that government officials made just prior to going live.

The leading contractors on the Obama administration's troubled health insurance website told Congress Thursday that the government failed to thoroughly test the complicated system before it went live.

The principal contractors responsible for the federal government's troubled health insurance website say the Obama administration shares responsibility for snags that have crippled the system.

The federal budget deficit will drop below $1 trillion for the first time in President Barack Obama's tenure in office, a new report said Tuesday.

An Associated Press poll shows that most Americans don't believe that Social Security and Medicare have to be cut in order to balance the federal budget.