were the only challenging candidates to defeat an incumbent gubernatorial ticket in the 2006 election cycle. On January 17, 2007, Brown was sworn in as Maryland's 8th lieutenant governor. Both Brown and O'Malley were reelected by a 56% to 42% margin on November 2, 2010. Brown was the first person ever elected lieutenant governor directly from the Maryland House of Delegates. Governor O'Malley tasked Brown to lead the O'Malley-Brown administration's efforts on several policy fronts, including efforts to expand and improve health care, support economic development, help victims of domestic violence, increase access to higher education, and provide veterans with better services and resources. In July 2010, Brown was elected chair of the National Lieutenant Governors Association, a position he served in for a term of one year. Health care As co-chair of the Maryland Health Care Reform Coordinating Council and Maryland's Health Quality and Cost Council, Lt. Governor Brown led the O'Malley-Brown administration's efforts to reduce costs, expand access, and improve the quality of care for all residents of the state. In June 2012, Brown was named "Maryland's Public Health Hero" by the Maryland Health Care for All! Coalition. He assisted in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which according to a "non-partisan" 2012 study using Obama administration numbers and various state agency projections, would save Maryland $672 million by 2020. In both 2011 and 2012, Brown led legislation through the Maryland General Assembly to create a health insurance exchange. Brown was severely criticized for his leadership of the development of the health insurance exchange. As of April 14, 2014, it had enrolled only 66,203 individuals (including family members on shared plans). The O'Malley administration apologized for the "botched" launch of the web site and had to seek emergency funding legislation to make stopgap changes to the site. The state paid a contractor $125.5 million to develop and operate the failed site. Due to the failed rollout, the state incurred an estimated $30.5 million in unnecessary Medicaid spending. The web site failure was the subject of a federal investigation into the costs associated with developing the exchange and the site's performance failures. The state announced that it was considering scrapping its failed online health exchange altogether and hiring a new contractor to build a new online exchange using technology employed by the state of Connecticut, at an expected cost of tens of millions of dollars. The Obama administration