The health insurance and employee benefits communities have had much less experience with Sylvia Mathews Burwell — the new Health and Human Services secretary nominee — than they have had with the outgoing secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

Sebelius, who formally announced her departure today, had been the insurance commissioner in Kansas, the governor of Kansas, and the president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners before she took over at HHS.

But Burwell, who has been director of the Office of Management and Budget since April 2013, also has ties to the insurance community: She was a director both of MetLife Inc. and of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from early 2004 through early 2013.

Continue Reading for Free

Register and gain access to:

  • Breaking benefits news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
  • Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
  • Critical converage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.

Allison Bell

Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.