Completing a tenure that has reviewers raving, “difficult,” “stormy” and “troubled,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announced her resignation tonight.
In a rare bit of evidence that the former Kansas governor may actually be a human being capable of shame, ABC says Sebelius has been looking to leave her perch at HHS for some time. She certainly had plenty of reasons to want to disown her signature accomplishment: the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
Although she has made clear, in the course of many public appearances over the last six months, that she brought her own share of incompetence and ineptitude to the Obamacare debut, Sebelius may be able to say one thing in her own defense: She was given command of the health-care equivalent of Operation Market-Garden, a seemingly attractive but bad plan that was composed almost entirely of high-risk variables, that was executed with a minimum of intelligence-gathering and a maximum of hubris, that took an enormous toll in human and material costs, and that despite its manifest failure will almost certainly be known to history as “90 percent successful.”
President Obama has headed off panic over Sebelius’s departure by reassuring the nation that he has another unqualified failure to take her place.