The board of Covered California has agreed to hire Jessica Altman — the Pennsylvania insurance commissioner — to succeed Peter Lee as CEO.
Lee, the outgoing Covered California CEO, has been leading the public health insurance exchange for more than 10 years and helped oversee the launch of its website in late 2013.
Lee announced plans in September to leave his post in early 2022. The exchange now says he'll likely leave in early March.
Altman, who is 33, has been Pennsylvania's top insurance regulator since 2017. Part of her job involved serving as the chair of the Pennsylvania Health Insurance Exchange Authority and setting up Pennie, Pennsylvania's state-run Affordable Care Act public exchange program.
The Second-Biggest ACA Exchange
Covered California is the state-run Affordable Care Act public exchange for California.
An ACA exchange program is supposed to be a web-based health insurance supermarket. It helps shoppers use federal subsidies to pay for coverage from private insurers.
Covered California is the biggest state-run ACA exchange. The only bigger ACA exchange organization is the Department of Health and Human Services' multistate HealthCare.gov program.
HealthCare.gov administers health coverage enrollment for 10 million people.
Covered California administers health coverage enrollment for 1.8 million people. Based on the share prices of for-profit health insurance sales websites, it might have a market value of about $500 million to $1 billion.
As Covered California CEO, Altman will earn $450,000 per year, exchange representatives said.
Peter Lee
Peter Lee is a lawyer who came to Covered California after running state and national health policy programs, and then working for two years in Washington at HHS.
Despite his lack of experience working as a health insurance agent or broker, Lee has repeatedly emphasized the importance of paying commissions to agents, communicating with agents and investing in marketing support.
Lee has said that the Covered California gets about half of its sales from agents, brokers and web brokers.
Jessica Altman
Jessica Altman grew in Menlo Park, California, and is the daughter of Drew Altman, the president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation runs an independent health policy research program.
