Unlike the real world, where managers and employees are judged on results and held accountable for their performance, in Washington, D.C., loyalty and partisanship almost always come first. Accountability comes later, if it comes at all.
This happens in every administration, and President Obama's is no different, as we've seen with the fatal mistakes made regarding the Fast & Furious gun program and in the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Democrats, claiming to see these as partisan witch hunts designed to hurt the administration politically, circled the wagons. Obama stood loyally by Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton
Loyalty is generally a good thing, in politics, as in life. But Kathleen Sebelius and her agency's rollout of Obamacare is different.
Sebelius' department had 3½ years to prepare to implement the Affordable Care Act. No one ever suggested that commandeering one-sixth of the American economy would be an easy task. (Many Republicans suggested the opposite and were dismissed as killjoys for their efforts.) But after the debacle of the last two weeks, liberals and Democrats - not conservatives or Republicans - should be calling for Sebelius's head.
The administration's handling of the implementation of Obamacare over the past three years has been a slow-moving train wreck: a mixture of embarrassing delays, hard-to-justify waivers, and assorted bad news about the unintended consequences of the law. Some of this was Sebelius's fault, some of it was not.
The crowning blunder came 10 days ago with the rollout of healthcare.gov website, the centerpiece of the administration's effort to sign individuals up for coverage through the government-run health care exchanges that are at the heart of the legislation. To say this was vitally important to the overall success of the law is an understatement. It is the aspect of Obamacare that the president himself has said is utterly essential - and backed up those words by letting the federal government shut down rather that give in to Republican demands to gut it. Nonetheless, its premiere was a giant flop - and Kathleen Sebelius is responsible.
The government's website apparently cost more than $500 million to build - and counting. This is more than LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Spotify, and yet it has been a disaster from the get-go, freezing, crashing, and locking people out.
The administration's line is that the website was overwhelmed by surprisingly strong demand, which they cast as a good thing. Programmers who peeked under the hood of the website scoffed at that assertion, saying that the site was so poorly constructed, so full of glitches and buggy code that it could never have supported even the most modest traffic levels. Some of that code was actually caused by spelling errors in Javascript.
Worse still, despite repeated warnings about the deficiency of the site, it apparently was not even taken out for a test drive before the administration launched the thing.
"It wasn't designed well, it wasn't implemented well, and it looks like nobody tested it," database programmer Luke Chung told CBS. "I would be ashamed and embarrassed if my organization delivered something like that."
The website remains a mess to this day, and even though Sebelius has issued repeated assurances her team is working around the clock to get it fixed, serious damage has already been done. According to one estimate, just 51,000 people in the entire United States were able to complete applications on the site during the first week.
Obama himself was reduced to pleading with people not to give up on signing up. Sebelius, dispatched this week to do damage control on The Daily Show, only made matters worse by stumbling through an interview with an exasperated Jon Stewart - a supporter of Obamacare - who couldn't get a straight answer from the HHS secretary about why businesses received a one-year delay from being hit with penalties in the law but individuals did not.
When the Obama administration loses Jon Stewart, you know things are bad. But supporters of Obamacare have a right to be furious with Sebelius. Her agency's bungling has put Obama's signature achievement, and his legacy, at risk.
Republicans are fond of saying that government would work much better if it were run like a business. Any corporation that allowed a COO to mismanage a new product line as important to its image as the Affordable Care Act is to Obama's would be contemplating their severance package.
The fact that Republicans haven't called for Sebelius' scalp should tell Democrats all they need to know about how much conservatives think she is hurting Obamacare's cause. If the president cares about rescuing his signature policy initiative, he should consider putting it under new management right away.
Tom Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics and the co-author of Election 2012: A Time for Choosing.
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What a liar! It may look like this 'lady' wants to get on top of the food pyramid. After reading some facts about her I think that she already is. So, to answer the question why she still has a job, let's just take a look at some of facts about this 'democrat', Kathleen Sebelius here _[Link] The photographs on the Wiki page are really revealing. Look at all of them! So, now let's take a look what this 'lady' is all about.
From Wiki:
"Kathleen Sebelius (/sɨˈbiːliəs/; née Gilligan; born May 15, 1948) is an American politician who has served as the 21st United States Secretary of Health and Human Services since 2009.
Sebelius is the daughter of former Democratic Ohio Governor Gilligan and thus they became the first father/daughter governor pair in the United States after her election. Following passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, she pointed out another father-daughter connection: her father had been in the House of Representatives when Medicare was originally passed in 1965.
Her husband, K. Gary Sebelius, is a federal magistrate judge and the son of former U.S. Representative Keith Sebelius, a Republican."
Now, read this:
"Sebelius was confirmed by the United States Senate by a vote of 65–31 and sworn in on April 28, 2009, amidst an outbreak of swine flu in the United States, Mexico, and numerous other countries around the world. Lieutenant Governor Parkinson was sworn in as Governor of Kansas and served the remainder of Sebelius's term.
February 28, 2009, the British wire agency Reuters reported that Sebelius had accepted the president's offer to become Secretary of Health and Human Services and that she would be nominated on March 2."
So, why it was so urgent to make her the Secretary of Health and Human Services amidst of an outbreak of the flue in 2009? Here [Link] we read:
"In 2009, the FDA issued a warning to consumers about the risk of argyria associated with the use of dietary supplements containing silver, including colloidal silver.
Argyria has occurred in people who drank homemade colloidal silver liquids as well as in people who used commercial colloidal silver products.
Although argyria is the most common adverse effect of consuming colloidal silver, some cases have been reported where colloidal silver may have caused kidney, liver, or nervous system problems. Colloidal silver may interfere with the body’s absorption of some drugs, such as certain antibiotics, thyroxine (used to treat thyroid disorders), and penicillamine (used to treat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and metal poisoning)."
And that is not all, read this article written by Dr. Mercola here [Link] That's why Dr. Mercola and others, people who really care, and are real doctors, not some phony ones, who repeatedly try to warn all of us about the devastating effects of silver products, have been targeted by this evil bunch, with the owners of Big Pharma corporations, here is one example, _[Link] leading the way. Websites like mercola.com, greenmedinfo.com and some are others now being watched and monitored, as the people who use these websites to learn and truthful information on how to heal themselves and their loved ones. How about that! After Sebelius got her job, the information about the dangers of ingesting silver was suppressed and only that, it's use has been heavily promoted through the media.
How do you like it so far? It looks to me like face of pure evil.
And next let's read this:
"During the 2004 election, Sebelius was named as a potential running mate for John Kerry. In the aftermath of Kerry's defeat, some pundits named Sebelius as a potential candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. After Barack Obama's clinching of the nomination in June 2008, speculation that she would be a contender for the vice-presidential slot on the Democratic ticket continued. The Washington Post listed her as the top prospect for the 2008 nomination. James Carville and Bob Novak also mentioned Sebelius' name, and Wesley Clark, also considered a potential running mate, publicly endorsed Sebelius, referring to her as "the next vice-president of the United States."
How is that for the whole picture!
And parents, please read this:
"Early in the term, Sebelius made education funding her top priority. Education funding reached a breaking point in the summer of 2005 when the Kansas Supreme Court ordered the Legislature to increase K–12 funding. Sebelius offered one education funding plan early in her first term, which consisted of property, sales, and income tax increases, resulting in 2006 in the largest K–12 education funding increase in the history of the state. The three-year plan aimed to increase education funding by nearly $1 billion over three years, but did not give a funding source for the second and third years."
That is who is so interested in your children's education. All these 'innovations' in the educational system of our children: K-12, charter schools, magnet schools and so on, and all new programs implemented in public schools look like they were specifically designed to dumb down our children, to flood them with 'certain' information, which by the way can be pretty traumatic for the young and impressionable minds, to keep them sedated with no time for playing, exploring and do what children are supposed to do to stay healthy and happy.
One more thing, I really want to say here. Watching the video in the article, where too of them where laughing, playing their game was a pretty disgusting sight. Laughing at human suffering, lying and laughing again, and again. What disgusting creatures you are! You think people don't see your evil ways? Wrong. They do now. And that's that!