Obama: Sebelius has done a ‘great job’

President Obama defended his embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Thursday, saying she had done a “great job” setting up the ObamaCare insurance despite the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov.

“I think Kathleen Sebelius, under tremendously difficult circumstances over the last four and a half years, has done a great job in setting up the insurance markets so that there is a good product out there for people to get,” Obama said when NBC News’s Chuck Todd asked him if the secretary retained his “full confidence.”

{mosads}He added: “You know, Kathleen Sebelius doesn’t write code. She wasn’t our IT person.”

The president said that the secretary would be the “first to admit that” the administration would handle the rollout differently if they could do it all over again.

“There would have been a whole lot more questions that were asked, in terms of how this thing is working,” Obama said.

But, the president added, “ultimately the buck stops with me.”

“I’m the president. This is my team. If it’s not working, it’s my job to get it fixed,” he said.

Obama, has, however, expressed his frustrations to Sebelius about the problems with HealthCare.gov.

Last month, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) sent Obama a letter demanding Sebelius’ resignation over the botched healthcare rollout. And 10 GOP senators sent Obama a letter on Thursday, demanding he fire Sebelius.

During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) repeated the demand to Sebelius’s face, telling the secretary she had “put our entire healthcare system and one-sixth of our economy in jeopardy.

Sebelius did not respond to Roberts, but at an event in late October said the Republicans who had called for her resignation are “people I don’t work for.”

“The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don’t work for, and who do not want this program to work in the first place,” she said. “I have had frequent conversations with the president and I’ve committed to him that my role is to get the program up and running and we will do just that.”