Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience

to illuminate critical public health issues.

If you have questions or ideas for us,

please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.edu

for future podcast episodes. Today, a different kind of conversation.

I speak with Andy Slavitt, the former administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services,

and the host of the In the Bubble podcast.

Andy transitioned from the private to the public sector, playing a critical role in the fixing of

healthcare.gov and later in the launch of President Biden's COVID effort. Our conversation

wanders from how Andy approaches government challenges to what it will take for public health to be

better funded, to why it's important for public officials to acknowledge mistakes.

Let's listen.

Andy Slavitt, thank you so much for coming to public health on call.

We know you have a remarkably successful podcast of your own,

so we appreciate your venturing over here to talk with me today about

government, public health, what works and what doesn't. Really cool to be here. Great to talk to

again, Josh. So I want to go back to when you and I first met. It was not my favorite time of my career. We were dealing with a failed health

exchange in Maryland trying to sell health insurance, but it wasn't working. You had been

...