Obamacare’s Latest Casualty

by Newt Gingrich: Secretary Sebelius’s announcement that she is leaving office is a good time to assess her impact.

Sadly her term as Secretary of Health and Human Services was a disaster.

Americans should be able to expect that people who enter high public office will see their job as a public duty and will view faithfully serving the public and administering the laws as their solemn obligation.

Secretary Sebelius ran her office in a secretive and extraordinarily partisan manner which frequently ignored, violated, and changed the law at whim.

Perhaps her approach merely mirrored the attitude of the Obama White House, but as the Senate-confirmed head of a major department of the American government, Secretary Sebelius must be held to a different standard than White House staff.

The White House staff is there to serve the president. Their positions are inherently personal and political. If the Obama White House is often arrogant, aloof, secretive and largely isolated from the Congress, it is because that is the President’s style. And that is his right.

Leading a major federal department is a very different proposition.

The Secretary of HHS has legal duties and obligations which define and limit what she can and cannot do for the president. Although he nominated her, her job is not defined by the president. It is defined by the law.

Again and again Secretary Sebelius operated secretly, without consultation, and beyond the limits of the law. She made dozens of changes to policy without the authority to do so, from waiving welfare’s work requirement, to pressuring insurance companies for Obamacare implementation dollars after Congress denied her budget request, to delaying the employer mandate–twice–outside the confines of the legislation.

In fact, her capricious redefinition of Obamacare will be studied for decades as a stunning betrayal of the rule of law.

Even after illegally assuming powers she didn’t have, however, Secretary Sebelius still failed spectacularly in her duty to administer competently.

I have worked with a number of very effective HHS secretaries–in particular Louis Sullivan, Tommy Thompson, and Mike Leavitt. They knew how to run things and how to get things done. By contrast, as an implementer, Sebelius may be the most incompetent major cabinet officer in modern times.

The Obamacare website disaster she oversaw is a historic case study in bureaucratic failure. Once all of the government decision documents have been released and all the participants interviewed, I suspect people will marvel at the isolated, ignorant, self-deceiving, and ultimately catastrophic way in which Sebelius and the department she led failed the American people.

The failure is inexcusable because a department undertaking to reorganize the entire health care system has an obligation to get the central mechanisms–the parts that allow people to obtain health coverage–right. Americans’ lives, jobs, and savings were at stake. Moreover, from a purely political perspective, the failure is all the more stunning because it was obvious from day one that the website would be the most public symbol of President Obama’s entire presidency.

Websites are now the stuff of everyday life. The public knows a good website from a bad website. And for years there have been effective, convenient, and reliable sites to purchase insurance online.

Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of the tech community supported President Obama.The level of expertise and experience Secretary Sebelius could have called on to help with the website was breathtaking. Half the population of Silicon Valley would have been delighted to participate in what was clearly going to be an historic undertaking. But she and the president did not do that.

There is a sickness, almost a mental condition, in the Washington political-bureaucratic class that leads it to believe it knows everything.

Twenty-eight-year-old congressional staffers stay up until three in the morning writing laws about systems they have never participated in and cannot possibly understand. Fifty year old bureaucrats who have spent their entire careers in small cubbyholes in giant Washington office buildings (visit the Humphrey Building which houses HHS and you will see what I mean) issue rules and regulations on topics and industries about which they know very little, affecting millions of people they don’t know in places they have never visited.

It was this kind of hubris which led to non-functional websites and the months of illegal changes to Obamacare.

And it is the same kind of hubris that led Secretary Sebelius and President Obama to travel the country advocating for a law that no one, including them, understood.

Secretary Sebelius’s final betrayal of the public trust–after her abuses of power and her failures of implementation–was her fundamental dishonesty with the American people.

She had an opportunity to help lead the country in a constructive, open dialogue about health reform. Instead she defended the law, denied facts, dismissed legitimate questions and deceived the public. She tried to spin us on the life and death matter of our health care.

The Secretary gave dissembling testimony before Congress about the website. (“The website has never crashed,” she said. “It is functional but at a very slow speed and very low reliability.” As she spoke the words, CNN displayed a live shot of healthcare.gov as it failed to load.) She repeatedly claimed not to know how many Americans had signed up for insurance on the exchanges, even months after they launched. She used secret email accounts to avoid disclosure rules that applied to her communications as a public official.

Secretary Sebelius owed the public an open, participatory process of implementation. Instead she chose the opposite strategy of secrecy, dishonesty and hidden deal making.

For delivering a breakdown when a breakout was possible, Secretary Sebelius was right to resign. She, and the administration she worked for, have done the American people a great disservice.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. Newt and his wife, Callista, host and produce historical and public policy documentaries. The above commentary was shared via his daily email via Gingrich Productions.

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