Must read of the week

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was finally forced out her position.






While many covered and spun for Sebelius and Barack Obama, Kate Randall (WSWS) offered reality:

In her remarks on Friday, Sebelius described the Affordable Care Act as “the most significant social change in this country” since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid nearly five decades ago. It is indeed significant, but not in the way the outgoing HHS secretary would have her audience believe. Specifically, the ACA undermines Medicare, the social health insurance program for seniors and the disabled, through proposed cuts of $700 billion over the next decade.
The Obama administration is committed to pushing forward with this regressive health care agenda, but without Sebelius at the HHS helm. During her tenure, she became the face of Obamacare and its botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, and faced numerous grillings on Capitol Hill from Republican and Democratic lawmakers over management issues at HHS in implementing the law.
While mismanagement, cronyism and incompetence were clearly involved in the disaster overseen by Sebelius at HHS, the problems were not purely technical in nature. More fundamentally, they were bound up with the irrational structure of Obamacare, which keeps the class-based health care system in place and subordinates the provision of medical care to the drive for profit. The high premiums and deductibles carried by the most inexpensive plans found on the ACA exchanges are a function of this structure.
The horrendous user experience suffered by uninsured people visiting the HealthCare.gov site—and the poor quality of the policies offered for sale—are a reflection of the contempt of the administration and its functionaries for the general population. While Obama claimed his health care plan would provide “near universal” access to quality health care, the 7.5 million people that have signed up for coverage are cynically seen by the White House as the statistical success to make the program more politically palatable.