The Affordable Care Act isn’t turning out well. Since Oct. 1, the initial day of the ACA’s rollout, the website Healthcare.gov has been rife with technical problems, and only about 50,000 people have signed up for the exchanges (a small proportion of the number the Obama administration was hoping for). Meanwhile, millions of insurance plans are being cancelled because they do not meet the ACA’s standards. Moreover, Healthcare.gov may be vulnerable to security threats, according to a memo from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. These problems aren’t going away, and pretending that everything is fine is going to ruin what is, in my mind, a pretty good law.

The Obama administration has dropped the ball. In response, Republicans have been jumping all over the administration in an effort to score political points, trying to showcase just how bad the implementation of the law has been in order to prevent its success.

I don’t have a problem with that. Republican leaders are doing their job as the opposition, and over the last 4 1/2 years of the Obama presidency we’ve all come to expect a certain level of inaccurate accusation from the Republican Party.

But the polarized politics surrounding the ACA cut both ways. Just as Republicans claim that the sky is falling, the Obama administration has been painting things as too rosy in an effort to counter all the bad press it has been receiving.

I understand that this is the signature piece of legislation from the Obama administration. I understand that it wants to counter the Republicans’ attacks on the law, that the administration wants it all to work for the best. But that effort to make things seems better is detracting from the fact that the law has a huge amount of problems that need fixing.

The simple truth of the matter is that the system isn’t working right. It doesn’t mean that the whole law should be scrapped; it does mean that the Obama administration needs to work hard to find solutions and, most importantly, admit there is a serious problem.

I don’t care how far it has to go to fix the system. Maybe it means a delay; maybe it means tweaking the rules of the new system for a few years. But without a solution, millions of Americans are going to be left without health insurance and be forced to pay a penalty because they can’t get it.

Polarized politics are killing this law. A good rollout, a good system of health exchanges and a good security system are all incredibly important to how successful it is going to be. But putting on a good face is only going to play into detractors’ hands and make the ACA as useless and horrible as the Republicans believe it is.

President Barack Obama needs to understand that admitting defeat isn’t the end of the world, and saying that you made a mistake isn’t going to ruin a presidency. What is going to ruin a presidency is a signature law that is harming millions of people. That is what will put you in the history books as a terrible president, regardless of who wins the next election.

We need honest answers about what is happening with the health care exchanges and a realistic time frame for how they will get fixed. Most importantly, though, we need to stop being lied to about just how bad things are.