A White House spokesman on Tuesday said President Obama still had confidence in Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius following the tumultuous rollout of the president’s signature healthcare law.
{mosads}Shortly after announcing that the government had enrolled more than 7 million people in health insurance plans through ObamaCare, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama “has had and has confidence in his secretary of Health and Human Services.”
Carney said Sebelius was “at the front of the line, getting to work” fixing the ObamaCare website, which was plagued in its early months by technical glitches.
“Those were hard days for a lot of folks who bore the responsibility of making the implementation of the Affordable Care Act a success,” Carney said. “But the response, to a person, was not to point fingers of blame but to roll up their sleeves and get to work fixing the problems.”
He also cautioned reporters not to read into the fact that Sebelius was not present when he announced that enrollment figures had surpassed initial Congressional Budget Office estimates.
“I think you’re obsessing on something that I promise you needs not obsession,” Carney said.
Last fall, some lawmakers, including Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), asked Obama to fire Sebelius over the botched rollout. During a Senate hearing, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) told the secretary directly she should resign after she had “put our entire healthcare system and one-sixth of our economy in jeopardy.”
In October, Sebelius 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.”
During an interview with Fox News that aired before the Super Bowl in early February, Obama said the administration held “everybody up and down the line accountable.”
“But when we’re in midstream … we want to make sure that our main focus is how do we make this thing work so that people are able to sign up,” Obama said.