The Buck Stops Where With Obamacare?

President Harry S. Truman had a small sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read, “The Buck Stops Here!” What this meant was that the ultimate responsibility for the actions of the government, whether good or bad, lay on the president. He had no one that he could “pass the buck” to, the blame or accolades are his and his alone. Truman said it himself in his farewell address to the American people, “The President–whoever he is–has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.”

It is a shame we do not have this level of leadership and responsibility in the White House any longer. The following is from an October 8th report from the Washington Post on Obamacare’s failing rollout;

“Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations. Despite those warnings and intense criticism from Republicans, the White House proceeded with an Oct. 1 launch.”

 Those decisions made with regard to Obamacare lie with President Obama. On October 14th, President Obama’s former spokesman, Robert Gibbs, took the airwaves on MSNBC to voice his frustration with the president’s signature legislation’s rollout. Here are a few of Gibbs’ quotes as reported by CNN;

“This is excruciatingly embarrassing for the White House and for the Department of Health and Human Services. This was bungled badly. This was not a server problem; just too many people came to the website. This is a website architecture problem.”

“Boy, if they don’t get these glitches figured out fast, people aren’t going to come back for visits 15 through 18. I hope they’re working day and night to get this done and when they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work.”

“We knew there were going to be some glitches. But these are glitches that go quite frankly way beyond the pale of what should be expected.”

I have some suggestions to Mr. Gibbs on just who should be fired. First, President Obama should fire his Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius for her total incompetence. Next, the president should do what any CEO of a major corporation would do after a blunder of this size, and one of his own making after being repeated warned not to do it. He should accept and admit responsibility, and then resign. But the American people could only be so lucky to still have a man in the Oval Office who accepts responsibility for his own actions.