Last week, when I wrote Kathleen Sebelius Avoids Meeting on Obamacare Enrolment Numbers, there were rumours that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had either resigned or been pushed.
She didn’t turn up for an announcement that the Obama administration was billing as the most significant event since launching Obamacare.
A few days later, a press release was issued in her name, which many said was proof that she had not been pushed and also that she had not resigned.
Conservatives said, as they have been saying for some time, that her management of Obamacare had been a disaster from the beginning.
So now, a week after the end of Obamacare’s first enrollment period, extended by an extra few weeks, as we had come to expect, Sabelius has resigned.
The administration now claims to have enrolled seven million Americans in Obamacare. Critics are not convinced. They say they are prepared to believe there have been seven million registrations, but not that those registrations are unique people, nor that those people chose, accepted and paid for health insurance.
Even the administration can’t verify the statistics, especially how many actually selected and paid for insurance.
The Obamacare law has been revised 38 times since democrats passed the law by pushing it through congress, with no input of vote from republicans.
The law has been a disaster from the beginning, and one had the finger of blame pointed at them more than Kathleen Sebelius.
The former Kansas governor was a member of the president’s cabinet for the past five years. In the last six months, Sebelius tried desperately to plug the many holes in the operation of the health care law.
The fact that she has now resigned may ease the pressure on her, but it will not stop the clamor to shut down and repeal the law.
Her replacement can look forward to a thorough grilling and no letup in the attempts to shut it down. The compliant mainstream press has not done its job of questioning the administration, investigating the anomalies, or exposing the far-fetched administration statements.
With a November election coming up, democrats are feeling vulnerable, and Republicans are expected to make the disastrous health law the centerpiece of their efforts to retake the Senate.
Sebelius was a key player in guiding the health care law through Congress in 2010 along with then House majority leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Now in 2014, Pelosi is out of her job and Harry Reid is on the verge of losing his.
She may have been one of the champions of the law, but she soon discovered that forcing a law through the congress was a whole lot easier than actually implementing it. Her relationship with the White House took a turn for the worst during the rollout of the insurance exchanges.
The healthcare.gov website was a very expensive pile of steaming garbage, and there was a distinct lack of planning and information coming from HHS over the extent of the website’s problems.
It may be over for Kathleen Sebelius, but the rest of us have to live with this mess for some time. If Republicans gain power at the next election, that could change.
