![]() ![]() He recalled that he was hard on the industries that he came from. ![]() (His sale of UnitedHealth stock after leaving Optum netted him nearly $2 million, reported the conservative Daily Caller.) The tweeting bureaucratīy most accounts, Slavitt wielded his considerable authority at CMS fairly. Slavitt says that he followed all ethical guidelines, divested completely from UnitedHealth, and didn’t talk to company officials while at CMS. Conservative media jumped on his nomination as a sign of lax ethics in the White House. When he was nominated, top Senate Republicans voiced concern over Slavitt’s close ties with the health care industry, and suggested that conflict of interest issues could preclude his ability to do the job well. The position requires confirmation in the Senate, but Republicans never brought him up for a vote, so he served as acting administrator through the end of Obama’s presidency. CMS was also tasked with implementing parts of Obamacare.īy March 2015, Slavitt was named acting head of CMS, and was formally nominated by Obama in July. In 2014, Slavitt left his lucrative post at Optum to become deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, or CMS, the Baltimore-based federal agency that operates the trillion-dollar programs that provide health care to seniors, the disabled and the poor. That work got him on the cover of TIME magazine, and on the president’s radar. He also helped with the online insurance exchanges of Minnesota and other states. Slavitt was part of the team that helped make major improvements to in time for a crucial open enrollment date in 2014, helping save Obama, and Obamacare, from continued dysfunction and embarrassment. The Obama administration contracted with Optum to help fix a major problem:, the website where people could buy insurance through the federal government, was plagued with technical problems after its launch in 2013. He moved from California to Minnesota in 2004 and entered the UnitedHealth ecosystem of companies, eventually rising to run Optum, a subsidiary that operates a variety of UnitedHealth’s patient services, like health savings accounts, as well as its data and information technology operations. Slavitt founded his own company, Health Allies, which he sold to Hopkins-based UnitedHealth Group in 2003. ![]() He put in time at Goldman Sachs and the consulting firm McKinsey and Company. He’s originally from Chicago - “I don’t have a Minnesota accent, I don’t think,” he said - and went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied business at the Wharton School, and then Harvard Business School. These days, he’s a highly sought-after commodity: Slavitt has perhaps the most knowledge of anyone in the country the health care programs that are at the center of the national debate right now. Slavitt did hold court in a Capitol Hill restaurant for a few hours one afternoon in March, sitting at a corner table while various Washington types filed in to meet with him for 30 minutes at a time. (“He doesn’t make time for lunch,” she lamented.) His wife, Lana, serves as his unofficial scheduler. to a hearing on Capitol Hill to meetings with lawmakers. On a recent weekday, he shuttled from a breakfast health care forum in downtown D.C. When in D.C., Slavitt keeps the schedule of a man possessed. Ubiquitous on cable news, Capitol Hill, and particularly, Twitter, Slavitt has thrown himself full-speed at a daunting task: stopping the destruction of Obama’s health care vision - and his own. In the first months of the Trump era, Slavitt has emerged as a top defender of Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid, and a lead critic of the GOP’s plans to overhaul the U.S. But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to fly back to Washington each week for work - though his job description is a little different now. When Donald Trump took the oath of office, Slavitt, like thousands of others, was instantly out of a job. ![]()
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