Kathleen Sebelius

Ezra Klein linked to this 2001 Governing profile of former Kansas Gov. and soon-to-be-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. It's well worth reading. Much of the profile is about how Sebelius balanced her reputation as a consumer advocate with the demands and needs of the insurance industry in Kansans. But these two paragraphs give a sense of Sebelius the administrator:

She has revamped her department’s technological capabilities, making it far more efficient. She has slashed regulations that were duplicative, irrelevant or particularly quirky. And she has worked with the legislature to deregulate commercial insurance lines and to boost tax credits for businesses that buy health insurance for their employees.

At the same time, Sebelius has raised the department’s profile as a source of reliable consumer information on companies and their products, and promoted a raft of consumer-oriented bills in the legislature: a patients’ bill of rights; mandated maternity coverage; a requirement that companies pay their bills promptly; an initiative to protect consumers’ privacy. She has created “market conduct” and anti-fraud units aimed at monitoring companies’ and agents’ behavior.

This devotion to common-sense needs, both for employees and consumers, strikes me as promising. If HHS needs new technology, Sebelius will be in a good position to fight for it. She'll know how to deal with a legislature to get what her department needs--she'll have done it before with what I'd guess will be a less receptive audience than the one she'll find on Capitol Hill.

As an aside, I really wish more outlets would publish stories like this one. I'd wager that the majority of the discussion of Sebelius's future until recently hinged on her less-than-stellar State of the Union response a while back, and maybe her telling former President Bush that she'd like her National Guard troops back from Iraq so they could do natural disaster response. But this kind of experience is far more telling about how Sebelius would lead an organization or a government than any political spin.