Free Republic

On Saturday, President Obama’s new Web startup—healthcare.gov—is supposed to work better. How much better is a little hard to pin down. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius says, "We are definitely on track to have a significantly different user experience by the end of this month." Considering the initial experience was a near total collapse, Sebelius is doing an excellent job at keeping expectations in the bargain basement. It is practically impossible for the site to fail at offering a "different user experience,” so her guarantee is perhaps the weakest promise one could make. The official promise...

Remember when this happened in Pittsburgh in the second week of the ObamaCare rollout? At least this time, Kathleen Sebelius signed up more people on her visit yesterday to South Florida than she did in Pennsylvania. A whopping two people managed to get all the way through the failing website to enroll in insurance during this media event at the office of an official ACA navigator: Sebelius, wearing green, walked through the front doors of North Shore Hospital near Miami Shores where she shook hands with hospital staff and members of the Epilepsy Foundation who are staffing the Obamacare Navigation...

With just hours to go until the government's Obamacare healthcare exchanges go live nationwide, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Monday that Obamacare's grand opening will be a historic success, "shutdown or no shutdown." "We're about to make some history," said Sebelius. "I think some very positive history for lots of families." Obamacare call centers and so-called "navigators"--those tasked with helping get people enrolled in Obamacare--will not be affected in the event of a looming government shutdown, said Sebelius.

ObamaCare's new insurance marketplaces are ready to launch as scheduled Tuesday "shutdown or no shutdown," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Monday. "We're about to make some history, and I think some very positive history for lots of families," Sebelius told reporters. Most of the funding for the healthcare law's implementation was provided in the law itself, and therefore would not be cut off if the federal government shuts down beginning Tuesday. The HHS officials who are overseeing the launch would not be sent home during a shutdown, nor would call centers, "navigators" and other people assisting with...

Sebelius Describes Federal Government As 'Our Federal Family' September 5, 2013 - 10:34 AM By Susan Jones (CNSNews.com) - September is National Preparedness Month, and in a news release urging everyone to be mindful of potential terror attacks, natural disasters, and pandemics, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the federal government is ready to help: "While our federal family is becoming better prepared to support the nation, we know that being truly resilient requires the whole community coming together," she said. "Simply put: bystanders can’t stand by. We’ve seen countless times that bystanders are truly the first responders....

Speaking Thursday at an event in Philadelphia, hosted by a Latino community service group, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius revealed that the success of ObamaCare is dependent upon the passage of comprehensive immigration reform and amnesty.Susan Jones at CNS News reported Friday that, when asked if the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) will help “undocumented individuals,” Sebelius responded that it would not, and that this is the reason why immigration reform is so important. "Well, the (Obamacare) bill is crafted in such a way that those who are undocumented will not have access to the tax credits or...

<p>Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl dying of cystic fibrosis, is receiving her long-awaited lung transplant.</p> <p>According to a Facebook post from Sarah’s mother, Janet, the family received word this morning of new lungs that had been made available, and Sarah is currently in surgery. The operation could take anywhere from six to 12 hours.</p>

A government watchdog group is seeking clarity into how an election regulation is enforced on government employees. Cause of Action sent a letter to several federal agencies on Monday asking how the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan campaign activity in their official capacity, applies to the subordinate who supported Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius when she violated the law last year. Sebelius broke the Hatch Act last year when she endorsed President Barack Obama and another Democratic candidate while speaking to a gay rights group in North Carolina in her...

The Planned Parenthood abortion clinic of Overland Park, KS, is currently on trial for 107 counts of falsifying abortion records and committing illegal late-term abortions, 23 of which are felonies. The charges were brought by former Attorney General Phill Kline in October 2007 following an investigation he launched in 2003.Today came the bombshell news that the administration of former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, destroyed critical evidence in 2005. The evidence was needed to compare records Kline acquired with records Planned Parenthood later submitted.From the Kansas City Star: Key evidence...

JEFFERSON CITY • Missouri’s College of the Ozarks has filed a federal lawsuit challenging a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would require its employee health plan to cover abortion services and certain types of contraception, including the morning-after pill. Leaders of the Presbyterian liberal arts college located near Branson say the mandate violates the school’s institutional religious beliefs. “The mandate chills the college's religious exercise by exposing the college to substantial fines for its religious beliefs and exercise of those beliefs,” the lawsuit states. “The mandate's required provision of insurance coverage for education and counseling concerning elective abortions...

Would you go to jail – with your bishop?It’s not often happened, in my lifetime, that the U.S. government would flatly require what God forbids, or forbid what God requires. Usually political judgments have had to do with teaspoon measuring and prudential reasoning, sorting and bargaining and trade-offs of competing goods. The policy picture is made by pencil: we sketch and erase, we compare estimated costs and benefits of differing public policies. These things are negotiable; and the negotiation is called politics. So it was most shocking, in the first few months of 2012, for American Catholics to face not...

Mount Sinai Hospital in New York ordered Cathy DeCarlo to assist in an abortion for a patient 22 weeks into her pregnancy. A pro-life nurse, DeCarlo had informed the hospital in 2004 that she was unwilling to assist in abortions. And both federal and state law allows health care providers, including nurses, to refuse to assist in abortions. DeCarlo pleaded with the hospital, which still had six hours to find a replacement nurse. Instead, DeCarlo says the hospital forbade her from seeking a replacement and falsely claimed that the mother could die if DeCarlo failed to follow orders. Following the...

It says something about the brazen attitude of American politicians that Congress enacted a measure to create a program that was impossible to implement -- and named it the CLASS Act. CLASS stands for Community Living Assistance Services and Support, a program that was supposed to offer voluntary long-term care insurance to workers who are 18 or older; its initials are about the only classy angle to the scheme. Last February, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the Senate that the CLASS Act, as written, was "totally unsustainable." In October, Sebelius announced that she could not implement the...

When the history of the 2012 campaign is written, a special place may be reserved for Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services and ex-governor of Kansas, who is doing her best to make the Affordable Care Act — aka, ObamaCare — disappear as a political liability for the president. The most compelling evidence of this is her decision to delegate to states the final decision on defining "essential health benefits" for minimum health insurance coverage. Some background: The ACA requires all Americans to have health insurance. But what's acceptable insurance? Under Section 1302 of the ACA, the secretary...

There is a lot of talk, during these pre-presidential election days, of whether Republicans should stick to fiscal policy issues or include social issues as well in their platforms. Liberals are attacking fiscal/social conservatives, and some “establishment” Republicans are also criticizing their socially conservative colleagues, fearful that Independents will be turned off by the thought that Republicans are appearing rigid, strict, and hard. Political strategy aside, however, what often strikes me about these debates, which always seem centered on how conservative Republicans are trying to force their social views on the nation, is that liberals do it all the time...

HHS this month sent a letter to 83-year-old Forest Labs CEO Howard Solomon, announcing it would henceforth refuse to do business with him. What earned Mr. Solomon the blackball? Well, nothing that he did—as admitted even by HHS. In any case, the federal complaint contained no suggestion that Mr. Solomon was involved with, or even aware of, misconduct. And the question of his continued leadership was never part of the plea deal. Only after a federal court ratified the deal in March did HHS drop its intent-to-ban bomb. Mrs. Sebelius unearthed a dusty provision in the Social Security Act that...

In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there's an epidemic? Some public health officials privately disagreed with the decision to stop testing and counting, telling CBS News that continued tracking of this new and possibly changing virus was important because H1N1 has a different epidemiology, affects younger people more than seasonal flu and has been shown to have a higher...

A recent Washington Post op-ed by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius suggests a new motto for the Obama Administration: "Home of the Whopper." The Sebelius piece contains no fewer than 10 health care whoppers, including: Whopper Number 1: Americans are too stupid to buy their own health insurance. SEBELIUS: Americans are left to worry about whether they'll get laid off and lose their insurance or wake up from surgery with a $10,000 bill because they didn't read the fine print on their policy. FACT: Most health care policies are fairly straightforward. My own Health Savings Account plan...

I do not condone what Roeder did to Tiller. I am not crying, either.

BREAKING NEWS... Kansas Gov. Kathleen Seblelius has won approval from a divided Senate panel to become secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration ... The head of the Family Research Council says he hopes the latest revelation about the "blood money" Health and Human Services secretary nominee Kathleen Sebelius received from Kansas abortionist George Tiller will cause senators like Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts to reconsider their support for her appointment. Family Research Council (FRC) and other pro-life groups have obtained a copy of a 2002 letter [PDF] in which notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller claims that...