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Speaking soon after the Health and Human Services secretary testified before Congress on Wednesday, President Obame took responsibility for fixing the troubled Obamacare site. "I'm not happy about it and neither are a lot of Americans who need health care," Obama said at a Boston rally. "There is no excuse for it and I take full responsibility for making sure it gets fixed ASAP. We are working overtime to improve it every day."

Amid Republican calls for her resignation, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius provided a personal mea culpa Wednesday as she testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "In these early weeks, access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans," she said. Speaking directly to Americans confronting the site problems, Sebelius added: "You deserve better. I apologize. I'm accountable to you for fixing these problems."

Marilyn Tavenner is the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which is part of HHS. Tavenner testified Tuesday before the House Ways and Means Committee about the Obamacare enrollment website and became the first administration official to apologize for the site's performance problems. "I want to apologize to you that the website does not work as well as it should," she said, adding that HealthCare.gov "can and will be fixed."

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Michigan, is the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the first congressional committee to hold hearings on the troubled Obamacare enrollment site. Upton opened Wednesday's committee hearing by saying news about Obamacare "seems to get worse by the day." "Americans are scared," he said. At a previous hearing, Upton called the launch of the website "nothing short of a disaster."

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, is the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Waxman said Wednesday that "the worst abuses of the insurance industry will be halted" by Obamacare. The California Democrat said the health care law's reforms mean better plans are available at lower premiums, and he urged his Republican colleagues to "stop hyperventilating" about problems with the website.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and is also the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. On Wednesday, Rogers accused Sebelius of putting the private information of Americans at risk by failing to properly test security measures on the Obamacare enrollment site. "This is a completely unacceptable level of security," he said. "You know it's not secure."

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, leads the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of conservatives in the House of Representatives. Scalise has an undergraduate degree in computer science and is a former systems engineer. At last week's hearing, Scalise told witnesses, "There's a saying in computer programming: 'Garbage in, garbage out.'"

Rep. Frank Pallone, D-New Jersey, made waves on Twitter when he called last week's hearing on the Obamacare enrollment site's problems a "monkey court." Pallone made the comment when a Republican lawmaker at the hearing interrupted Pallone and asked him to yield his remaining allotted time to speak.

Cheryl Campbell is a senior vice president of CGI Federal, a contractor for the troubled website. "In principle, it worked," Campbell said at last week's hearing when asked by a lawmaker about the product her company delivered for use by the public on October 1. "It's not working great, and we're working to improve it. But it is enrolling people." After Campbell testified last week, CNN obtained a confidential September 2013 report from CGI to CMS that warned of a number of open risks and issues for the site even as company executives were testifying publicly that the project had achieved key milestones.

Andrew Slavitt is group executive vice president of Optum/QSSI, another contractor for the site. "The system didn't receive adequate end-to-end testing," Slavitt told lawmakers last week.

Lynn Spellecy, corporate counsel of website contractor Equifax Workforce Solutions, testified before Congress last week.

John Lau, program director of website contractor Serco, appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week.

Rep. Dave Camp, R-Michigan, is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. On Tuesday, Camp raised concerns about the administration's projection of initial low enrollment in Obamacare's new exchanges. "I fear we can see a fundamental breakdown of the insurance market where premiums will skyrocket, pricing millions of Americans out of health care," Camp said to CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner.

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Michigan, is the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Illinois, confronted Tavenner on Tuesday with anecdotal evidence from a constituent about changes to the individual insurance market linked to the implementation of Obamacare, changes that undermine Obama's oft-repeated pledge that "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan." "She has health insurance that she likes. She's been paying her premium. She wants to keep it. But she can't," Schock said. "Isn't that a lie?"

Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-New Jersey lambasted Republicans at Tuesday's House Ways and Means hearing for choosing to pile on the website woes instead of working with Democrats to improve Obamacare. Pascrell pointed out that his party worked with the GOP to improve the Bush administration's Medicare prescription drug benefit even though Democrats opposed the new program. "We lost the policy fight" then but chose to help make the program work instead of trying to discredit or undermine it. "How many of you stood up to do that?" the Democrat asked of his GOP colleagues, "None. Zero. Zero."

Jeff Zients, former acting director of the White House Office of Budget and Management, has been tapped by the administration to provide advice to HHS as the federal agency works to resolve the problems with the Obamacare enrollment site.

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Editor's note: Newt Gingrich is a co-cost of CNN's new "

(CNN) -- At points, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius sounded downright Orwellian in her testimony before Congress on Wednesday, such as when she explained that "the website never crashed. It is functional, but at a very slow speed and very low reliability and has continued to function." Prolonged periods of minimum usefulness, perhaps, but don't call it a "crash," she said with a straight face.

On the other half of the television screen, CNN showed a live shot of HealthCare.gov with the message displayed, "The system is down at the moment." But in the world of Obamacare, a mandate is an "option," expensive is "affordable," and now apparently failure is "function."

Of course, the problem with Obamacare isn't just the website, and the loss in credibility isn't just the secretary's. President Barack Obama and other supporters of the law spent years telling the American people that "if you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period." They said detractors who suggested otherwise were lying. They said Republicans were just trying to scare people.

The President and his allies were the dishonest ones, as is now clear to everyone. Even while they were promising Americans nothing would change if they liked their policies, "the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them," as NBC News reported this week. Already more than 2 million people have had their insurance plans canceled -- three times as many as have signed up for Obamacare.

Yet the President continues to insist, as he did Wednesday in Boston, that "if you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law" -- of course, it was the law that made them "substandard," by definition -- "and you liked that plan, you were able to keep it." In the same speech, he took credit for liberating Americans from those "substandard" policies. This is as good an example of "double-think" as anything we've seen in American politics.

While the President and the other pitchmen of Obamacare have certainly lost credibility, however, Sebelius in particular needs to be held accountable for the launch failures. She added the problem of terrible management on top of the law's many flaws, and in doing so has put the health, financial security and personal information of hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk.

Across the country there are people who will have to buy insurance through the exchanges in just a few months, some because Obamacare caused their policies to be canceled, some because Obamacare caused their employers to dump their coverage.

Sebelius in the hot seat

Lawmaker: Obamacare is better coverage

Many of these people will face steep new costs that they weren't anticipating. But today, a full month after the exchanges went live, Americans who visit HealthCare.gov to find out what coverage they and their families will have and how much it will cost them must spend hours of frustration trying to navigate a broken system.

Even more alarming, the secretary's bad execution of the President's bad plan could put thousands of Americans' personal information at risk. Sebelius told Rep. Mike Rodgers on Wednesday that she would have to get back to him on whether there had ever been a complete security test of the system.

When the person who is supposedly overseeing a system into which hundreds of thousands of people are entering their personal information says she will "get back to you" about whether there has been thorough security testing, it is terrifying.

And on top of everything else, the exchange website is a complete boondoggle. Sebelius testified the government has spent almost $175 million on HealthCare.gov so far, and the real tab will surely be much higher after the emergency repairs. Already, this is substantially more than Apple spent to develop the iPhone, and even (as I pointed out recently) more than NASA spent on the Mars Pathfinder mission. It likely makes HealthCare.gov the most expensive website ever built, and certainly the most expensive not to function -- although perhaps that word no longer means what we thought it did.

These failures of management make the pain of a bad law even worse. I oppose the law. I have always opposed the law. I believe it will fail and cannot be improved. But most of all, honesty counts in public officials, and after Sebelius' testimony Wednesday she should have lost her credibility even in the eyes of Obamacare's supporters. It's time to offer her the option of mandatory retirement.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of Newt Gingrich.