A top Obama administration official in charge of implementing Obamacare is stepping down at the end of February.
Marilyn Tavenner, who has led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for three years and oversaw the agency through the botched HealthCare.gov rollout, announced her resignation Friday. Andrew Slavitt, the agency’s second-in-command, will step in to serve as acting administrator.
“It is with sadness and mixed emotions that I write to tell you that February will be my last month serving as the Administrator for CMS,” Tavenner wrote in a letter to colleagues Friday.
The passage of the 2010 healthcare law brought new challenges, but through hard work, CMS “cleared the path and laid out a plan for all we needed to accomplish,” she added.
“With those changes came a whole new set of responsibilities and a spotlight that brightly shown on all of us as we managed the largest federal agency budget, strong opinions across the nation, and our ultimate mission of improving our country’s healthcare system and saving lives,” she wrote.
Despite her central role in the rollout of the controversial law, Tavenner herself has generally received strong bipartisan support. She was broadly confirmed as CMS administrator in May 2013 after serving as acting administrator for about a year and a half.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell praised Tavenner for her “exemplary service, leadership, and historic record of accomplishment.”
“For the last half decade, she has insisted on pushing forward, no matter how severe the storms we faced,” Burwell wrote to staff.
“It’s a great testament to the respect she’s earned that Marilyn was the first administrator to be confirmed by the Senate in six and half years — and she was confirmed with overwhelming, bipartisan support.”
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who served as the top Republican on the Finance Committee during Tavenner’s confirmation hearings, said she has “done a great job in a very difficult position under near impossible circumstances.”
“She has proven herself to be a strong leader and a straight-shooter who brought in much needed private sector sensibility into the agency,” he said. “I truly appreciate her service and wish her the very best in her next adventure.”
