About
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Rima Cohen is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute's Health Innovators Fellowship. She served for nearly six years in the Obama Administration as Counselor for Health Policy to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at HHS. In that position, she helped develop and lead health care initiatives related to the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, Medicare, health care quality and civil rights. Ms. Cohen was also the Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation and the Acting Assistant Secretary for the HHS Office of Civil Rights. Before that, she oversaw New York City's health care programs and agencies as Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Director of Health; and she spent a decade as the senior health policy advisor to former-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. After leaving Capitol Hill, she founded Insurance Options for the Uninsured (IOU), which implemented strategies for expanding health coverage in New York. In that position, she developed the original blueprint for the state's Family Health Plus program, which covers up to 500,000 low-income adults, and she created the first web-based tool linking New Yorkers with free and low-cost health and social services. Rima is a member of the board of Alluma, a non-profit social enterprise , and a member of the advisory council for Princeton University's Center for Health and Wellbeing. She has a master's degree in public affairs and economics from Princeton and a bachelor's in economics from the University of Michigan; she also did undergraduate work at the London School of Economics and, after graduate school, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study program evaluation methods employed by U.S. NGOs in Indonesia. Rima lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter.
