White House Turns To 'Rock Star' Manager For Obamacare Fix

[88m3]

by

October 23, 2013 4:59 PM

Jeffrey Zients was tapped to help fix problems with the Obama administration's heath care website.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Jeffrey Zients isn't exactly a household name. But if he can cure what ails the Affordable Care Act website, he'll be one of the best-known figures in the Obama administration.

Zients (rhymes with Heinz) is the professional manager President Obama turned to in order to solve the by-now-infamous problems with the federal government's health care exchange website.

Zients was settling into his job as the head of Obama's National Economic Council when the president tapped him to help rescue the site. The 46-year old is known as a brainy problem-solver with a knack for cutting through bureaucratic knots.

It was Zients, for instance, whom Obama turned to at an earlier point to unstick the "Cash for Clunkers" initiative. That 2009-2010 federal effort to lift auto sales out of the doldrums by underwriting dealer rebates to car buyers had stalled when the computer systems were overwhelmed with requests. Zients is credited with overseeing that fix.

Zients performed a similar managerial feat to break a bottleneck on GI Bill benefits for post-9/11 vets.

"Jeff Zients is a rock star," said Vivek Kundra, who served as the Obama administration's chief information officer from 2009 to 2011. "He has an amazing ability to convene the right people, to be pragmatic about problem-solving and to focus the energy of the administration on execution. He can close the gap between the theoretical and the ability to actually deliver something meaningful."

Besides being the administration's chief performance officer during Obama's first term, Zients served two stints as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

His OMB experience gave him plenty of experience testifying before Congress. That should come in handy since he's likely to find himself planted for hours on end at the many hearings Congress promises to have on problems with the Obamacare website.

Fred Malek, a long-time Republican fundraiser, adviser to presidents, corporate chieftain and Zients fan, said: "I think he's very well suited for the job. Look, he's not a technology expert but that's not what you need. You have a lot of technology experts being imported to help with this fix.

"What you need is somebody who can manage a team, lead a team, figure out what the most important aspects of things are and drive them toward a positive result," Malek said.

"Jeff is a very good CEO. He works very well with people. He's highly analytical but at the same time has a very nice personal touch which enables him to get buy-in to what he wants to do, to get followership and to get people moving in the right direction," he said. "He understands the world of business. He understands the world of government. He knows enough about technology. But above and beyond everything else, he's just a damn good manager."

That said, here are few more things to know about Zients:

• He and Malek (that included Colin Powell) that got Major League Baseball to agree to return a team to Washington. But in one of Zients' few high-profile failures, the MLB awarded the franchise to another group. Still, Malek credits Zients with getting city officials in Washington, D.C., on board with the effort, something Malek hadn't been able to achieve before Zients joined.
• He honed his management chops early and hasn't let them dull. Shortly after graduating from Duke University (summa cum laude, of course, in political science), he became a management consultant, eventually holding the chief executive officer's job and other top posts at two firms that provided corporate clients with research and management advice.
• He had a supersized payday when the two companies went public. In 2002, Fortune estimated his wealth at $149 million, which placed him 25th on its list of the richest Americans then under 40.
• His mother, Debbie Zients, thinks the world of him, that he "has a lot of brains up there but he's very caring and very compassionate."

(Revised at 6:08 pm.)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpoli...-turns-to-rock-star-manager-for-obamacare-fix

 

[88m3]

bump

 

[the cac mamba]

seems like the type of dude id vote for

 

[No1]

Obama Finds Healthcare.gov’s New Hero
by Daniel Gross Oct 24, 2013 4:20 PM EDT

Jeffrey Zients was just appointed to fix Healthcare.gov. Daniel Gross on why the hire is an uncharacteristically brilliant move by Obama.

By any stretch of the imagination, the rollout of Healthcare.gov, the federal health insurance exchange, is going poorly. Three weeks into its existence, it doesn’t seem to work. Slow to anger and cast blame, the Obama administration is now taking action. It is bringing in a SWAT team, staging a technology surge, calling on “the best and the brightest,” as the Department of Health and Human Services noted in a blog post.

Health Department Secretary Kathleen Sebelius lacks the technology and management chops to bring this project home. So Obama has called in Jeffrey Zients, whom White House Spokesman Jay Carney called “an expert in the field of effective management.” Zients, who cut his teeth as a management consultant at Bain & Company, helped David Bradley build the Advisory Board Company, a health care consulting firm, into a juggernaut, and grew rich after it went public. Zients has served as a super capable Geek-on-Call, helping to fix programs that have gone awry and stepping in to fill crucial rolls. He worked on the Cash for Clunkers program in 2009, served as Chief Performance Officer at the White House, and served two stints as acting head of the Office of Management and Budget, from July 2010-November 2010, and from January 2012-April 2012.

It’s possible—even likely—that Zients will turn Healthcare.gov into a model of efficiency and high functionality. The problem for the White House—and it’s a recurring one—is that someone with Zients’s capabilities, stature, and record wasn’t running the operation from the beginning.

Best and the Brightest” performed during the Vietnam Era, you’d think Democratic administrations would eschew the term on a permanent basis.) But what Obama needs isn’t an archetype from the Kennedy years. He needs an archetype from the Roosevelt years: a heroic, committed administrator with a long attention span, a bleeding heart, and a desire to achieve great things. Somebody who is fully committed and willing to stay the course, who regards a high-level government position as the culmination of a career, not as one of many stops. Someone who sees making government projects work for people as his or her life’s work, as a journey. He needs, in short, a Righteous Pilgrim. Someone like Harold L. Ickes.

Most politicos today probably are more familiar with his son, Harold M. Ickes, a combative campaign operative who worked in the early Clinton White House. But with all due respect to the son, the father was far more influential, and a far more towering figure in his day.

Nearly 20 years ago, when I interviewed Harold M. Ickes in his White House office, I saw a photograph on the wall. It showed Harold L. Ickes and a bunch of people at a groundbreaking for a huge building. The inscription read: ““Harold, stop making mud pies. Franklin Roosevelt.”

Ickes made mud pies, and a lot more, during his tenure at the Department of Interior. A native of rural Pennsylvania, he worked as a reporter and lawyer in Chicago, got into politics as a reforming Republican, and became an enthusiastic backer of FDR. At age 59, he came to Washington with the Brain Trusters, assumed his position in March, 1933, and stayed through February, 1946—nearly thirteen very consequential years. (Labor Secretary Frances Perkins was the only other original cabinet member to last as long.)

Many analysts would chalk up the Healthcare.gov problem—and other management issues that have cropped up—to President Obama’s lack of private-sector experience. That’s bollocks. Plenty of veteran private-sector mangers screw things up every day. And many presidents with little private-sector experience proved very effective at running the executive branch. What was missing in the Healthcare.gov roll-out was a lack of historical awareness.

It seems that the Health Department and the White House didn’t grasp the stakes, or the symbolism, of getting the exchange done right and on-time. Healthcare.gov isn’t just a website, or a payment processing machine. It’s a vital piece of commercial infrastructure, perhaps the most important such project undertaken in the past decade. The Affordable Care Act is the single most important public works program of the Obama administration. It will impact the lives of tens of millions of people, and change the way a truly massive industry does business. It’s the Hoover Dam, Appalachian Trail, TVA, and the Rural Electrification Authority rolled into one.

Now, many parts of the ACA have been implemented without a hitch. The Medicare surtax is collected efficiently and automatically. Insurance companies aren’t kicking 23-year-olds off their parents’ insurance. But given the states’ reluctance to set up their own exchanges, Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange, was destined to be a huge construction project. And that meant that it needed somebody in charge who would regard this not just as one of many projects he or she is overseeing, and not just as something he or she might spend a year or two working on before heading to Wall Street or academia. No, it needed someone who would see this construction project as the culmination of a life’s work.

The Obama administration now has somebody who is really good at cleaning up muddy problems on the case. What it really needed last year was someone in a position of authority who loves to make mud pies.

 

[CACtain Planet]

throw the website in the bushes and start from scratch... delay the individual mandate for a year while your at it because their is no way 7 million people will be signed up by March which means premiums and taxes will rise to account for lost revenue in Obungacare