The first, and perhaps most painful, call for Kathleen Sebelius to resign as President Obama?s health secretary came this month from an old family friend: Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, who once boasted of a "special relationship" with Ms. Sebelius, forged when he worked for her father-in-law. Now Ms. Sebelius, the former Kansas governor who is the public face of Mr. Obama?s health care overhaul, is facing a barrage of criticism over the problem-plagued rollout of its online insurance exchange. Although she runs the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency directly responsible for the health care law, there are questions about how deeply she was involved in the development of the troubled Web site.
A familiar troubleshooter has been enlisted to try to fix the government's health insurance website, administration officials said Tuesday, as political pressure piled up over the centerpiece of President Obama's healthcare law. Jeffrey Zients, a former acting director at the Office of Management and Budget, will assist the Department of Health and Human Services with "short-term advice, assessments and recommendations," White House spokesman Jay Carney said. Zients has served as the chief performance officer at OMB, a job aimed at improving government technology and efficiency.
Crammed into conference rooms with pizza for dinner, some programmers building the Obama administration's showcase health insurance website were growing increasingly stressed. Some worked past 10 p.m., energy drinks in hand. Others rewrote computer code over and over to meet what they considered last-minute requests for changes from the government or other contractors. As questions mount over the website's failure, insider interviews and a review of technical specifications by The Associated Press found a mind-numbingly complex system put together by harried programmers who pushed out a final product that congressional investigators said was tested by the government and not private developers with more expertise.
So few insurers offer plans on some of the new government health insurance exchanges that consumers in those states may pay too much or face large rate increases later, insurance experts say. An average of eight insurers compete for business in 36 states that had exchanges run or supported by the federal government last month, the Department of Health and Human Services says. (Idaho has since started its own exchange.) But just because an insurer sells in a state, it doesn't mean it sells in every area of a state so many residents have far fewer options.
Two hospital workers and a pilot were killed when a medical helicopter crashed in Tennessee as the aircraft was headed to pick up an ailing child. Le Bonheur Children's Hospital President and CEO Meri Armour says the Hospital Wing helicopter was cleared for both weather and flight plans when it took off Tuesday morning. Armour said that the pilot and crew were experienced, and that they had a great helicopter. Authorities began searching for the helicopter when it didn't respond during a routine check-in around 6:20 a.m.
Depending on whom you ask, medical giant UPMC either employs more than 50,000 people -- or no one at all. On Monday, in one of the first hearings of the city of Pittsburgh's lawsuit to strip UPMC of its tax-exempt charity status, Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr. opened a hearing on the city's lawsuit against UPMC with that very question. "Does UPMC have any employees?" he asked. "I've been told in discovery they don't." William Pietragallo, one of the attorneys representing UPMC at the hearing, answered. "They do not," he said.