Board Chair, United States of Care
Most weeknights at around 9 p.m. ET, former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services acting administrator Dr. Andy Slavitt unleashes his daily tweetstorm. Alternately funny, thoughtful and furious, the dispatches tackle the COVID crisis from any number of angles: the leadership vacuum, the cascading economic effects on older people (whether or not they fall ill), the psychological/PTSD crisis likely to linger long after vaccines have been administered.
They’d feel like a shout into the abyss — that is, if they weren’t warmly received and echoed by his more than 621,000 followers.
Whatever partisan accusations are slung his way — he worked on the Obama administration’s rollout of Healthcare.gov — Slavitt’s public health bona fides and overarching empathy have been on display since well before shutdown.
He sounded early alarms about the country’s preparedness, anticipating shortages of ventilators and hospital beds in the first week of March. Similarly, he predicted the challenges that a raft of conflicting messages would create. “We’ve got a competency and a credibility problem, which is going to make it very difficult to manage through this,” he told MSNBC in February. Doubt him at your own peril.
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