Melanie Fontes Rainer

Melanie Fontes Rainer, JD, MSEd is a national leader in healthcare policy, law and regulation. Her expertise spans private and public health insurance, the Affordable Care Act, competition in healthcare, cost containment, transparency, privacy, cybersecurity, digital health and AI, civil rights, and regulatory oversight of healthcare. She has worked in the highest government offices serving the public in the United States Senate, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the California Department of Justice. 

Most recently, Melanie served as the National Director for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). She is a transformative leader, who led a national reorganization to better meet the agency’s budgetary needs, reduce its backlog of complaints, and focus work on its mission to the public. Significantly she revitalized the case resolution process to be more efficient and responsive to the needs of the healthcare system–leading to one of the highest collections of settlements and penalties collecting $9.9 million with 22 settlements in 2024. She advanced a robust policy agenda to help ensure people can access healthcare with new rules on nondiscrimination, use of AI in healthcare, patient privacy and substance use, reproductive privacy, and strengthening cybersecurity. During this time Melanie was on the HHS Leadership Committee on AI, working to advance a framework for use of AI in healthcare nationwide and was appointed to the White House Reproductive Access Task Force in response to the loss of Roe v. Wade. 

Melanie also served as Counselor to Health & Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, providing strategic guidance on health policy. In this role, she led the implementation of the bipartisan No Surprises Act, increasing transparency in medical billing and saving consumers money. She was also appointed as the Secretary’s designee on the White House Competition Council leading cross-cutting Department work on the national healthcare economy, price transparency, costs, and competition to benefit American consumers. 

Before joining the Administration, Melanie served as the Chief Healthcare Advisor at the California Department of Justice, where she led a national team to save the Affordable Care Act at the United States Supreme Court protecting coverage for over 133 million Americans. She also facilitated the creation of a new team, the Healthcare Rights and Access Division, devoted to proactively advancing healthcare rights, competition, and consumer protection in California. She is a pragmatic leader who worked on multiple groundbreaking settlements, such as the $575 million historic settlement with Sutter Health to increase competition and consumer choice in California and multiple historic bipartisan settlements to address the national opioid epidemic. 

Melanie previously served in the U.S. Senate as a Senior Aide to Chair Patty Murray on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the Budget Committees. Here, she helped pass several transformative healthcare laws, including the 21st Century Cures Act, Every Student Succeeds Act, and the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, among other laws and led the Senate’s work on the Affordable Care Act.

She is an alum of the University of Arizona and the City University of New York, Brooklyn College. In 2023, she was awarded the University of Arizona’s Distinguished Citizen Award in recognition for her work to make healthcare affordable and accessible for people across the country