Jessica Altman May Lead Pennsylvania Insurance Department

By Allison Bell

May 26, 2017 at 10:31 AM

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Pennsylvania could soon have a new insurance commissioner.

Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, says he wants to nominate Teresa Miller, the current commissioner, to be the first secretary of a new state Department of Health and Human Services.

Jessica Altman, Miller's chief of staff, would become the new insurance commissioner.

(Related: 5 Long-Term Care Hybrid Perspectives)

Miller has been Pennsylvania's insurance commissioner since January 2015. While serving as the head of the department, she has organized an annuity shopper education campaign; promoted a shift toward a savings-based approach to paying for long-term care; and played a major role in the Penn Treaty liquidation.

Altman received a bachelor's degree in policy analysis at Cornell University in 2010.

From 2010 through 2013, she worked for the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that set up the Affordable Care Act public exchange system and ran other commercial health insurance programs related to the act.

Altman then went to Harvard University and received a master's degree in public policy there in 2015.

She has been working as Miller's chief of staff since June 2015.

She's the daughter of Drew Altman, the president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

— Read Kaiser: Small-company workers suffer most as health costs riseon ThinkAdvisor.