ObamaCare has killed the career of its beleaguered point person.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has quit her post following months of criticism. Sebelius’ resignation, confirmed Thursday in an e-mail from Dori Salcido, a department spokeswoman, comes little more than a week after the close of enrollment for the first ObamaCare coverage period.
It also follows recent efforts by the White House to rebound from the fiasco that marked the program’s launch last year, when massive technical glitches kept people from logging in to the HealthCare.gov Web site.
A flurry of last-minute applications before the March 31 deadline allowed the White House to claim it had finally hit its target of 7 million enrollees.
Sebelius, an ex-Kansas governor, held her post for five years and was among Obama’s longest-serving Cabinet members.
Obama, who is announcing the resignation Friday, has picked his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, to replace Sebelius. Burwell was unanimously confirmed by the Senate for her current job, and her selection suggests the president wants to avoid a bitter nomination fight over Sebelius’ successor.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Sebelius’ departure would not fix the problems with ObamaCare.
“Secretary Sebelius oversaw a disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, but anyone can see that there are more problems on the way,” Priebus told Fox News. “The next HHS secretary will inherit a mess — Americans facing rising costs, families losing their doctors, and an economy weighed down by intrusive regulations.”
Sebelius was instrumental in helping ObamaCare win congressional approval and in implementing its initial components, including a popular provision that lets young people remain covered by their parents’ insurance until age 26.
But her relationship with the White House suffered during the rocky Web rollout of the Web-based insurance exchanges, with complaints about a lack of information from the HHS about the extent of the problems.