Thursday, April 10, 2014

Kathleen Sebelius finally released from Obamacare's fifth circle of hell ! Sebelius to resign as secretary of HHS - So , she rushed out the door as soon as gracefully possible after the March 31 , 2014 , kinda of , sort of deadline for Obamacare enrollment !



A fitting farewell to Kathleen @Sebelius: http://youtu.be/QYz0LUI7o1k  via @YouTube
snark quickly followed....





Breaking: Outgoing HHS Secretary Sebelius announces that 7.1 million pages were actually missing from her farewell speech.








A page was always missing with Obamacare and poor Sebelius never could find it.......








http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2602017/Kathleen-Sebelius-resigning-HHS-post.html


Kathleen Sebelius quits: Embattled HHS Secretary pays for Obamacare woes despite promises ELEVEN days ago that she would remain through November


Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today turned in her resignation to President Barack Obama in a stunning shift in the continuing Obamacare saga.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who heads the White House Office of Management and Budget, will be nominated to take her place, according to multiple White House sources. 

The White House press office announced Thursday night that he would announce the nomination at 11:00 a.m. Friday, a few hours before he departs for fundraisers, and a speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network, in New York City.
Sebelius was not expected to remain in the Obama administration through the end of the president's second term, and several news outlets reported late Thursday that a White House official said she told Obama in March that she would be ready to leave 'once open enrollment ended.'

She said in an interview with The Huffington Post on March 31, however – the last day of that six-month period – that she would stay at the top of the HHS organizational chart until Obamacare's second open enrollment period arrived in November.

'I'm in,' Sebelius said then. But now she's out.

Kathleen Sebelius (R) was by Obama's side on October 1 as Obamacare's tumultuous public introduction got underway
Kathleen Sebelius (R) was by Obama's side on October 1 as Obamacare's tumultuous public introduction got underway
What a difference six months make: When the president took his April 1 victory lap in the White House Rose Garden, Sebelius sat in the audience and didn't earn a mention from the podium, even as Obama singled out members of Congress for praise

What a difference six months make: When the president took his April 1 victory lap in the White House Rose Garden, Sebelius sat in the audience and didn't earn a mention from the podium, even as Obama singled out members of Congress for praise

The timing of her departure is designed to allow her to leave with a scrap of honor, coming just a week after Obama announced that his administration had exceeded its target of 7 million enrollees after months of fiasco.
The White House aims for her resignation to soften the constant barrage of controversies connected with the president's flagship policy.

Republicans were quick to pounce Thursday, confounding those hopes.

'Kathleen Sebelius had a supremely difficult job implementing a law as unpopular and unwieldy as Obamacare,' House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa said in a statement. 

'Her tenure as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services may be at an end, but Americans will be dealing with the repercussions of the president's health law for a very long time.'

On the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol, minority leader Mitch McConnell called it 'fitting that nearly one year after the primary legislative architect of Obamacare predicted it would be a train wreck that the government official most responsible for overseeing it reportedly is resigning.'

'Regardless of the administration’s public explanation for the Secretary’s exit, Obamacare has been a rolling disaster and her resignation is cold comfort to the millions of Americans who were deceived about what it would mean for them and their families.'


The train-wreck reference was a nod to former Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, now Obama's ambassador to China, who warned Sebelius on April 17, 2013 that the Affordable Care Act was headed for the rocks.

'I just see a huge train wreck coming down," he said then. 'You and I have discussed this many times, and I don't see any results yet.'

Other Senate Republicans echoed McConnell's stern tone.

'This is the right decision,' according to Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander. 'The challenge for Ms. Burwell, or any other successor, is to help Congress find the right way to repair the damage Obamacare has done to American families.'

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley said in a statement that '[a]nybody put in charge of Obamacare would be set up to fail. Secretary Sebelius was asked to promote something unready, poorly structured, and unpopular.'

The Affordable Care Act has indeed been fraught with disaster since its official rollout in October. Its website crashed, cost estimates quickly rose, and public dissatisfaction has dogged the initiative for more than two years.

The October 1 online launch was nothing short of disastrous, with even liberal commentators and Democrats in Congress conceding that the government's effort was not ready for prime time. Contractors' efforts were incompatible, data servers were inadequate, and payment systems linked to the website were yet to be built on launch day.

Sebelius presided over all of it, producing misgivings across the U.S. capital that she was up to the task. She has, however, been the administration's designated spear-catcher, attracting slings and arrows from both houses of Congress and the public at every turn.

Kiss off: Sebelius had served in Obama's Cabinet for five years and was favored by the president. But after months of defending her she's on her way out

Kiss off: Sebelius had served in Obama's Cabinet for five years and was favored by the president. But after months of defending her she's on her way out

The president raised eyebrows nationwide on April 1 when he failed to acknowledge her contribution to the program's recent momentum during a high-profile Rose Garden victory speech.
Sebelius, who has served in Obama's cabinet for five years, was not there alongside him but sat, unnoticed, in the front row.

As the White House shifted from shame to fist-pumping, Sebelius continued to attract scorn.

Sebelius: from nowhere and back there again

Kathleen Sebelius joined the Obama administration in April 2009 as a figure unknown to Americans in 49 states. She had been  governor of Kansas from 2003 to 2009, and that state;s insurance commissioner for eight years before that.
Her only national platform prior to Obama's election came in 2008 when, as a former chair of the Democratic Governors Association, she was tapped to deliver her party's response to President George W. Bush's final State of the Union address.
She wasn't expected to play a role in the new administration until former Sen. Tom Daschle, a South Dakota politician who had once been Senate Majority Leader, withdrew his candidacy for the top HHS job following a tax scandal.
He had failed to pay taxes on more than $83,000 in earnings in 2007, and claimed tax deductions for nearly $15,000 of donations to charities that didn't meet the IRS's tax-deductibility standards.
Sebelius hasn't said where she will go after she leaves the president's cabinet. Her three immediate predecessors have found life after government as a law partner (Tommy Thompson), a university professor (Donna Shalala) and a think-tank chief (Mike Leavitt).
None of them, however, presided over a program that, like Obamacare, was controversial, partisan and fraught with failure from the beginning.
She said during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Thursday that more than 7.5 million Americans had chosen health insurance plans through the Obamacare system.
She could not, however, answer a question from Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch about how many subscribers were uninsured before the law took effect.

Additionally, she hasn't provided Congress with answers about how many Obamacare enrollees have paid premiums, a necessary step to become formally enrolled in insurance plans.

A recent McKinsey and Company study estimated that no more than 1 million Americans both lacked insurance before the rollout and have paid money into the system.
The White House has not announced the date of Sibelius' departure, but a senior aid to a Republican senator told MailOnline that a quicker resolution to the HHS vacancy would benefit both sides of the aisle more than a long, drawn-out process.

Her resignation will also leave Senate Republicans with an unusually irresistible opening to drag more details of the Affordable Care Act's implementation into public view.
Although Democrats will likely have more than enough votes to confirm Obama's nominee, more than a half-dozen liberals facing difficulties re-election fights will likely be forced to moderate their enthusiasm for Sibelius's replacement.

Public hearings could become a spectacle of Republicans demanding internal documents and the White House claiming executive privilege. At the least, the confirmation process will bring to the surface once again conservatives' objections to Obama's new insurance model.

'The president doesn't need more Obamacare controversy so close to November,' a senior aide to a Senate Republican told MailOnline shortly after the announcement of Sebelius' departure.

'And if Republicans object too much to Burwell, the Democrats will trot out the "war on women" narrative even more. We don't need that in an election year.'




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Obamacare Claims Its Latest Victim: Kathleen Sebelius Resigns As US Health Secretary

Tyler Durden's picture





Obamacare has been such a smashing success that the US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just couldn't wait until days after its "successful" roll out to get the hell out of dodge.

Sebelius is out. HHS secretary has told Obama she is resigning. Obama to nominate OMB's Sylvia Matthews Burwell on Friday, per WH officials





















http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/10/sebelius-to-resign-as-secretary-of-hhs/


Sebelius to resign as secretary of HHS

POSTED AT 6:56 PM ON APRIL 10, 2014 BY ALLAHPUNDIT


So they hit their target of seven million sign-ups and she’s still out the door before the dust settles, eh? Seems … not so triumphant.
Allegedly she jumped rather than waiting to be pushed, but the Times catches something I missed last week. She wasn’t at the Rose Garden ceremony where O declared Mission Accomplished after they hit seven million. Hard to believe she wouldn’t want to be there to join the victory lap after taking so much grief from so many sides for so long over the website. Was she not invited?
Officials said Ms. Sebelius, 65, made the decision to resign and was not forced out. But the frustration at the White House over her performance had become increasingly clear, as administration aides worried that the crippling problems at HealthCare.gov, the website set up to enroll Americans in insurance exchanges, would result in lasting damage to the president’s legacy…
Last month, Ms. Sebelius approached Mr. Obama and began a series of conversations about her future, Mr. McDonough said. The secretary told the president that the March 31 deadline for sign-ups under the health care law — and rising enrollment numbers — provided an opportunity for change, and that he would be best served by someone who was not the target of so much political ire, Mr. McDonough said.
“What was clear is that she thought that it was time to transition the leadership to somebody else,” he said. “She’s made clear in other comments publicly that she recognizes that she takes a lot of the incoming. She does hope — all of us hope — that we can get beyond the partisan sniping.”
Her replacement is Sylvia Mathews Burwell, currently head of Obama’s OMB and someone whom, says the Times, O thinks will bring “an intense focus and management acumen to the department” in contrast to the now departing supervisor of the Healthcare.gov Chernobyl. The confirmation hearings will, I trust, be zesty.
As for Sebelius, I’m nominating her right now to replace Brendan Eich as Mozilla CEO. She’s got plenty of website expertise. I’m sure we’d all be glad to see Firefox “benefit” from it.
I thank Secretary Sebelius for her service. She had an impossible task: nobody can make Obamacare work.

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