Dive Brief:
-
Former acting administrator for CMS Andy Slavitt has signed on as a senior adviser with the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) for the next 10 years, The Washington Post reported.
-
Natalie Davis, who worked under Slavitt as a senior adviser at CMS, will also join the BPC as director of strategic engagement.
- “It wasn’t great for Democrats to be the only ones owning coverage reform. Republicans are finding out it isn’t great either,” Slavitt told the Post. “Everybody can own this together, because there will inevitably be challenges.”
Dive Insight:
Slavitt is not the first high-profile figure involved in federal health policy to join the health project at BPC. Others have included former Senate majority leaders Tom Daschle (R-SD) and Bill Frist (R-TN) as well as Avik Roy, president of the the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and former adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Partisanship has impeded broad healthcare reform at the national level since before the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. While polarization and animosity has characterized discourse surrounding the ideological direction that healthcare reform takes, there is broad consensus for certain policies. For instance, MACRA, which Slavitt began to implement during the end of his tenure at CMS, passed with bipartisan support.
In the past several months, Slavitt has spoken optimistically about prospects for value-based care policies and his desire to see a bipartisan approach to healthcare reform. “There should be no pride of authorship,” Slavitt told Modern Healthcare in December 2016. “If we can improve upon the things that were started in the ACA, we should do it.”
Prior to his time with CMS, Slavitt spent about a decade working with UnitedHealthcare, so he is well-attuned to industry concerns and familiar with the inner workings of governmental bureaucracies. A position with BPC offers provides Slavitt with organizational support and like-minded allies to continue his push for a bipartisan approach to healthcare reform.