Leadership and the Universal Health Care - Essay Example

 Sebelius acknowledged that the eight-week period of the health care insurance marketplace roll-out was the lowest point in her work as secretary of Health and Human Services. This is not surprising because the failure has a severe political impact on both the Obama administration and the policy itself. Such failure already eclipsed the positive outcomes of the policy, which already enrolled up to 7.1 million Americans (NBC 2013). More importantly, however, it reflected the brand of Sebelius leadership particularly in managing a complex project that could indicate an inadequacy to take the lead in the area of public health.

Technical FailureThe insurance marketplace rolls out the required health care enrolment online. A website, HealthCare.gov, was created in order to serve as the primary destination for Americans to buy insurance. Upon its launch, however, it encountered severe connectivity issues, server downtimes, and serious inability on the part of users to use the website productively, frustrating many Americans in the process.One could say that Sebelius is not the developer of the website and did not create its code.

However, the event demonstrated how she was able to handle one of the most critical programs not just of the health department but also of the incumbent administration. The outcome reflected her performance as a leader of the health department. Her leadership style appears to be largely political in nature and this is not surprising because she was a political appointee and was the Kansas governor previously. This goes against the necessity to appoint leaders of public health that have the capacity to understand and, therefore, deal with the complexities and scale of problems and issues in public health.

Koh and Jacobson (2009) stressed that public health problems entail special challenges that require long-term solutions and the cooperation of numerous stakeholders (p. 199). Sebelius failed in this respect. For instance, reports indicate that she tends to delegate decision making to state governments if they involve controversial or unpopular issues (Samuelson 2011). Indeed, when ACA mandated the secretary to define “health benefits”, she then decided to give the choice to the states.

Political vs. Authentic In retrospect, Sebelius may have been appointed because she is a political operator. There was a need for universal health care to be accepted by polity and the public and her leadership approach may have been initially seen as desirable. However, her failures in her tenure at the health department show the imperative for different kinds of public leadership such as authentic leadership and complexity leadership. According to Avolio, Walumbra, and Weber (2009), these leadership styles ensure that leaders have the right motivations and visions in addition to the guarantee that leadership fits the needs of the specific situation and challenges in which it operates (p. 430).