Who: Andy Slavitt, 50
New role: Senior adviser to the Bipartisan Policy Center, where he'll work with former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle and Dr. Bill Frist on healthcare issues.
Background: Slavitt comes to the Washington, D.C.-based think tank from the CMS, where he served as acting administrator from March 2015 to January 2017. He first joined the agency as principal deputy administrator in June 2014 and helped fix the crash-prone HealthCare.gov site. Before his federal government roles, he was group executive VP at Optum and CEO of OptumInsight.
Beyond politics: A bipartisan policy approach is especially important now, Slavitt said. “We've gotten ourselves too caught up in label identification. We're going to have to move past that,” he said and take practical issues into account. “There needs to be a set of resources and people from both sides of the political aisle who don't have to agree on everything but have to be serious-minded about getting the solutions that work for the real world.”
His time at the CMS: Slavitt looks back on his time in government fondly. “There was nothing like waking up every day and knowing that you were going to make decisions that were going to really matter to people.”
