Kathleen Sebelius Is Resigning Because Obamacare Has Won

Former Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein has sparked a contentious debate over why Kathleen Sebelius has decided to resign as the head of Health and Human Services (HHS).

AP

In a column on his new website, Vox.com, Klein argues "Kathleen Sebelius is resigning because Obamacare has won.”

“Calls for Sebelius's resignation were almost constant after Obamacare's catastrophic launch,” he writes. “The problem wasn't just that Sebelius had presided over the construction of a fantastically expensive web site that flatly didn't work. It was that she didn't know healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail. And so the White House didn't know that healthcare.gov was going to instantly, systemically fail.”

After President Barack Obama refused to “panic” and fire Sebelius, the evidence started piling up that the “strategy worked,” Klein adds.

Now that Sebelius says she’s “confident in the trajectory for enrollment and implementation,” he explains, she can step aside.

Klein concludes: “In other words, the law has won its survival. The Obama administration can exhale. Personnel changes can be made. A new team — led by Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Matthews Burwell, who the White House calls a proven manager— can be brought in to continue to improve the law. And Sebelius can leave with her head held high. She can leave with the law she helped build looking, shockingly, like a success.”

Unsurprisingly, not everyone agrees with Klein. Users on Twitter were having a field day mocking the article.

Further, Sebelius told HuffPost Live on March 31 that she would be "absolutely" sticking around for the next phase of Obamacare. The Obama administration maintains she resigned on her own and was not forced out.

Read the entire column here.