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.