The ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on the floor of the upper chamber this morning called on President Obama to ask Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to resign.

“Expecting this secretary to be able to fix in a few weeks what she has not been able to fix during the last three and one half years is unrealistic. It is throwing good money after bad,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said.

The senator highlighted how at least 1.5 million people are poised to lose healthcare coverage starting on Jan. 1 because their policies are not legal under Obamacare. “If the exchange is not working, they will not be able to choose another policy through that exchange. At some point there has to be accountability,” he said. “Taxpayers have spent $400 million to create exchanges that, after three and one half years, still don’t work.”

“No private sector chief executive officer would escape accountability after such a poor performance. And the principle of accountability is not foreign to the public sector. Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, told his submarine captains that they were not only accountable for their ships, but they were also accountable for the nuclear reactor on their ships.  If anything went wrong with the reactor, their career in the Navy was over, the Admiral said. As a result of that dose of accountability, since the 1950’s there never has been a death as a result of a problem with a naval submarine reactor.”

“Americans deserve that kind of accountability in the implementation of the new health care law,” Alexander added. “Instead, the secretary appears not even to have told the president about known problems with the Obamacare website in the months and days leading up to the launch. Despite repeated requests, she has refused to tell Congress or the public the reasons the Obamacare website continues to fail while insisting on more time and an undisclosed amount of money to fix it.”

“It is time for the president to ask the secretary of Health and Human Services to resign.”