Washington Post: “The White House’s leadership of the immense project — building new health insurance marketplaces for an estimated 24 million Americans without coverage — is one of several key reasons that the president’s signature domestic policy achievement has become a self-inflicted injury for the administration.”

“Based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former administration officials and outsiders who worked alongside them, the project was hampered by the White House’s political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law — sensitivity so intense that the president’s aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition.”

Tennessee state Sen. Brian Kelsey (R) presented HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius a copy of Building a Website for Dummies during a visit, the Memphis Daily News reports.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) called for her resignation prior to her visit and
released a statement saying, “The secretary is always welcome in
Tennessee, but her time would be better spent in Washington fixing the
Obamacare website.”

As President Obama “pushed for a new federal health law in 2009, he made a simple pledge: If you like your insurance plan, you can keep your plan. But behind the scenes, White House officials discussed whether that was a promise they could keep,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“When the question arose, Mr. Obama’s advisers decided that the assertion was fair… But at times, there was second-guessing. At one point, aides discussed whether Mr. Obama might use more in-depth discussions, such as media interviews, to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches, a former aide said. Officials worried, though, that delving into details such as “the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president’s message.”