Former Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene has replaced Zients as website manager, at least through the first half of 2014.  "We're fortunate that Kurt DelBene is now part of the administration—there's no one better able to help us keep moving forward to make affordable, quality health insurance available to as many Americans as possible," Obama health care adviser Phil Schiliro said in a statement to Reuters.  The White House appears, for now, to be concentrating on ironing out the remaining glitches in HealthCare.gov to ensure millions more people are able to sign up for coverage in 2014. Good enrollment numbers are seen by both critics and supporters of Obamacare as a key measure of the program's success.  "So my sense is that they're not thinking about appointing a CEO in the short term," said Topher Spiro, a health care analyst with the Center for American Progress.  The CEO proposal calls for removing day-to-day control of the marketplace from the CMS bureaucracy and placing it under a leadership structure like those used in some of the more successful state-run marketplaces, including California.  The new team would be managed by a CEO, or an executive director, who would run the marketplace like a business and answer directly to the White House, sources familiar with the discussions say.  They point to insurance industry and health care veterans as potential candidates, including former Aetna CEO Ronald Williams, former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson and Jon Kingsdale, who ran the Massachusetts health exchange established under former Governor Mitt Romney's 2006 healthcare reforms. None of the three was available for comment.  Health care experts say the idea should have been taken up by the administration years ago.  "It's the right thing to do. It's just two years late," said Mike Leavitt, the Republican former Utah governor who oversaw the rollout of the prescription drug program known as Medicare Part D as health and human services secretary under President George W. Bush.  "The administration is confronted by a series of problems they cannot solve on their own. They do not possess internally the competencies or the exposure or the information," he told Reuters.  Emanuel, one of the administration's longest-standing allies on health care reform, recommended a marketplace CEO in an Oct. 22 Op-Ed article in The New York Times, calling it one of five things the White House could do to fix Obamacare.  "The candidate should have management experience, knowledge of how both the government and health insurance industry work, and at least some familiarity with IT (information technology) systems. Obviously this is a tall order, but there are such people. And the administration needs to hire one immediately," he wrote.  The administration has adopted Emanuel's four other recommendations: better window-shopping features for HealthCare.gov; a concerted effort to win back public trust; a focus on the customer shopping experience; and a public outreach campaign to engage young adults.
The White House is coming under pressure from some of its closest allies to name a CEO to run its health insurance marketplace.