Obama’s Medicare nominee gets GOP leader’s support

RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s Medicare nom­i­nee Tues­day got unex­pected sup­port from one of Con­gress’ Repub­li­can stars. House Major­ity Leader Eric Can­tor told The Asso­ci­ated Press that Mar­i­lyn Taven­ner is “emi­nently qual­i­fied” to run Medicare.

It may be too soon to con­tem­plate a truce in the polit­i­cal wars over health care. With Taven­ner, major play­ers on both sides may be able to shift from con­fronta­tion to problem-solving.

The White House announced Tavenner’s nom­i­na­tion last week to replace cur­rent Medicare chief Don­ald Berwick, who had run into a wall of oppo­si­tion from Repub­li­cans and couldn’t even get a hear­ing in the Sen­ate. As head of Medicare and Med­ic­aid, the for­mer nurse would be respon­si­ble for pro­grams that already pro­vide cov­er­age to 100 mil­lion Amer­i­cans, as well as for putting in place the new health over­haul law to cover the uninsured.

Can­tor said he met Taven­ner years ago when he was a state leg­is­la­tor in Rich­mond, Va., and she was a senior exec­u­tive for Hos­pi­tal Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica, a major hos­pi­tal chain.

“She was an indi­vid­ual with a wealth of knowl­edge about the com­plex­i­ties of the health care sys­tem, and she came for­ward with solu­tions that actu­ally made sense,” said Can­tor. “I always found her to be extremely pro­fes­sional and under­stand­ing of the value of the pri­vate sec­tor in health care.”

Taven­ner, 60, is cur­rently Medicare’s prin­ci­pal deputy admin­is­tra­tor. She started her career as a nurse and worked her way up to hos­pi­tal exec­u­tive before enter­ing gov­ern­ment ser­vice as Virginia’s health care sec­re­tary. She came to Wash­ing­ton last year as Con­gress labored in the home stretch to pass Obama’s health care law.

Can­tor is not a mem­ber of the Sen­ate, so he does not get a vote on Tavenner’s nom­i­na­tion. But his views are influ­en­tial with other conservatives.

“I would hope to be able to sup­port her,” said Can­tor. “Obvi­ously, I’m not in the Sen­ate, so I don’t have that vote, but I do think she is qual­i­fied. Obvi­ously, she’ll be work­ing for a pres­i­dent with an agenda that’s quite dif­fer­ent from mine.”

Can­tor said he is con­vinced that Taven­ner is com­mit­ted to pre­serv­ing the role of the pri­vate sec­tor in health care. Respon­si­bil­ity for health cov­er­age in the U.S. is close to evenly split between fed­eral and state pro­grams like Medicare and Med­ic­aid, and work­place and pri­vate insur­ance. Repub­li­cans charge that Obama is try­ing to engi­neer a com­plete takeover by gov­ern­ment, while the pres­i­dent insists his way is the best approach for pre­serv­ing a sys­tem of shared respon­si­bil­ity in the face of unsus­tain­able cost increases and mil­lions of uninsured.

Taven­ner “is some­body who under­stands the pri­vate sec­tor and busi­ness con­cerns” said Can­tor. “Mar­i­lyn Taven­ner has expe­ri­ence as a nurse at the prac­ti­cal level, and as a health sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor of a very larger national com­pany. Hope­fully she’ll bring that type of experience.”

Tavenner’s nom­i­na­tion has been endorsed by groups rep­re­sent­ing hos­pi­tals, doc­tors and the health insur­ance indus­try. Some con­gres­sional Democ­rats may ques­tion her over her tenure at Hos­pi­tal Cor­po­ra­tion, which was embroiled in a major Medicare fraud inves­ti­ga­tion in the 1990s. None of that seems to have involved Taven­ner, however.

Posted by AP News on Nov 30 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.