Medicare nominee praises Berwick, touts work on healthcare law

President Obama’s nominee to lead the Medicare agency touted the administration’s progress implementing healthcare reform Thursday.

Marilyn Tavenner, in her first public appearance since she was nominated, said the administration has made strides on important provisions and pledged to continue working on efforts to improve care and lower costs. It was, on the whole, a strenuously vanilla speech from a nominee hoping to avoid the type of political firestorm that engulfed her predecessor.

Tavenner is leading the Medicare agency in a temporary capacity while her nomination waits in the Senate. She would succeed Don Berwick, who left the job after his yearlong recess appointment expired.

Tavenner praised Berwick on Thursday for his commitment to reforming the healthcare delivery system and said she would continue pushing ahead with programs intended to cut healthcare costs while improving the quality of care. 

Medicare has tried, for example, to bundle its payments for the various services a single patient will receive as part of his her or her treatment, hoping the new structure would prompt doctors to work together more closely. Tavenner said there’s also progress to be made in streamlining administrative procedures, which she said is “not as sexy as talking about bundled payments.”

She said the healthcare reform law provides new tools to aid that transformation, and also recapped popular, relatively noncontroversial provisions including lower prices for prescription drugs and new insurance pools for people who have been denied coverage.

“That law was meant to build on our current health system,” she said. “We know what’s working and we know what needs improvement.”

A recent Congressional Budget Office report said programs like Medicare’s bundled-payments initiative have mostly failed to control costs, and in some cases have actually made care more expensive.

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