After 5 years, leader of Medicare to resign
WASHINGTON — Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who supervised the troubled rollout of the federal insurance marketplace, said yesterday that she is resigning.
“February will be my last month serving as the administrator for CMS,” Tavenner said in an email to agency employees.
Tavenner, who was partly responsible for the disastrous debut of the online insurance exchange in October 2013, had given no public indications that she would be stepping down. She joined the administration in February 2010, a few weeks before President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act.
She was a senior official at the Medicare agency, which insures 1 in 3 Americans and has an annual budget of more than $800 billion, before she was confirmed by the Senate in May 2013 as administrator.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said Tavenner “will be remembered for her leadership in opening the health-insurance marketplace. In so doing, she worked day and night so that millions of Americans could finally obtain the security and peace of mind of quality health insurance at a price they could afford.”
The exchange, a centerpiece of the health law that lets people shop for health-insurance policies, was nearly unusable for several weeks after it opened in the fall of 2013.
Burwell said that Andrew M. Slavitt, the No. 2 official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, would become the acting administrator.