Dive Brief:
- HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell has announced a series of management changes intended to centralize management of the federal health insurance marketplace, a move popular with both critics and supporters of the ACA. She's also adding senior staff at CMS.
- Burwell says she plans to hire a CEO to oversee the health insurance exchange, and is rumored to be searching for a chief technology officer for the marketplace as well.
- Burwell has also appointed a second-in-command within CMS. The new hire is Andy Slavitt, group vice president of Optum, the key contractor that has been coordinating HealthCare.gov improvements.
Dive Insight:
If Burwell wants to make sure that the next open enrollment period for the insurance exchange goes smoothly, it makes sense that she jumped right in — just two weeks after stepping into her new role — and began putting more leadership structure in place. While HealthCare.gov works far better now than it did at launch, it's still a giant undertaking, and critics say it failed previously because no one person was in charge of making it work. Having a clearer leadership structure in place should help avoid any catastrophic failures in the future.