Less than a month before the new year, Minnesota joined three other states looking for a new health insurance exchange leader, after the first director, a former state economist and insurance company vice president, stepped down amid website dysfunction, a data breach and an ill-timed vacation.
At a Dec. 17 meeting, the board of MNSure announced that Scott Leitz, assistant health commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Human Services, would take over as interim CEO. April Todd-Malov, the former state economist and UnitedHealth Group government affairs vice president who led the exchange since 2011, has stepped down.
The board said the change positions MNSure "to focus on both the short-term need to fix key technology issues and its long-term mission of enrolling as many Minnesotans as possible in affordable healthcare."
After limited website functionality following the Oct. 1 launch, MNSure said that as of the end of November, 32,000 applications were completed and that 24,000 Minnesotans had signed up for coverage, although it's not clear how many enrolled in Medicaid compared to private plans.
Todd-Malov faced increasing criticism after the website, built with $151 million in federal funding, failed to meet initial expectations and as problems persisted over the past two months, among them a faulty tax credit calculator. On Dec. 16, MNSure asked 1,000 applicants to redo their applications, as exchange staff and contractors rush to rerun 30,000 other applications to double check tax credit eligibility.
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat up for reelection next year, has faced calls from critics to intervene after news broke that Todd-Malov took a trip to Costa Rica in November (with her partner, the state Medicaid director) while problems with the website persisted. The exchange also saw a data breach in September, after an employee accidently sent a group email to insurance brokers containing their Social Security numbers (which an audit later determined shouldn't have been collected in the first place) and other personal information.
MNSure's interim CEO, Leitz, the former public policy director for for Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, said his "immediate priorities" include working with insurers on enrollment troubleshooting, "increasing transparency," and "moving quickly to identify, solve, and communicate problems impacting customers."
"MNsure must do better. If there are problems or mistakes, we will acknowledge them and fix them," Leitz said in a media release.
"The Board believes the organization is at a stage where it needs a CEO to manage both MNsure's current challenges and position it for greater success in the future," said MNSure's board chair Brian Beutner, UnitedHealthcare's former general counsel and recently the CEO of a startup selling patient payment software for physicians.
Hawaii, Maryland and Oregon's state health insurance exchanges are also on the market for new leaders, amid varying degrees of website and enrollment problems consumers are still encountering.