Dive Brief:
- Henry Chao, the IT executive who was in charge of the Healthcare.gov rollout, has retired from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
- Chao has resigned his position as the Deputy Director in the Office of Information Services after more than two decades at CMS.
- Chao's last day was April 30; a spokesperson for CMS did not say who would replace him.
Dive Insight:
Chao took a lot of the heat for the initial problems with the Healthcare.gov portal. He and three other federal IT executives testified before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the site's rollout and the cybersecurity oversight process. Of the four who testified, Chao was the only one to refute the public's claims that the site was an "abysmal failure" and that the cybersecurity testing was flawed.
On the other hand, several months before the portal's scheduled launch, Chao told HHS officials that there were problems with the program contractors and with the software, yet he failed to make the necessary changes to correct the problems.