Commissioner

Ensuring access to quality health care, improving early access to prenatal care, expanding home and community-based care for seniors and implementing reforms to strengthen the state’s health care delivery system are among the top priorities of Heather Howard, New Jersey’s 14th Commissioner of Health and Senior Services.

An attorney with 15 years of federal and state health policy experience, Commissioner Howard, 39, previously worked in the White House where she served as Associate Director of President Bill Clinton’s Domestic Policy Council, and Senior Policy Adviser to First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Before Governor Jon S. Corzine nominated Howard as Commissioner on November 29, 2007, Howard served as Governor’s Corzine’s Policy Counsel for two years. She advised on all policy issues and directed the policy staff. She worked closely with the Governor’s Commission on Rationalizing Healthcare Resources, which studied the state’s financially stressed health care delivery system and recommended dozens of reforms in January 2008. Commissioner Howard is now leading efforts to implement those reforms.

One of her first initiatives as commissioner was to appoint a Prenatal Care Task Force to identify barriers and explore new approaches to improve early access to prenatal care. She has played a key role in efforts to expand health insurance coverage for the uninsured and to protect FamilyCare, the state’s health insurance program.

In May of 2008, Commissioner Howard received a women’s health advocacy award from the New Jersey Primary Care Association for her commitment to improving the health care delivery system—particularly women’s health, maternal and child health services and health programs for vulnerable populations.

In the area of public/partnerships, Commissioner Howard and the Department sponsored a highly successful Latino Diabetes Summit along with the Health Care Institute of New Jersey and the Latino Leadership Alliance. The summit brought several hundred health care professionals, Latino leaders and community activists together to address the epidemic of diabetes in Latino communities.

In the spring of 2008, Commissioner Howard called on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to investigate lead in nylon turf fibers after testing by the Department found elevated lead levels in the nylon fibers on a municipal soccer filed in Newark.

From 2001 to 2006, Howard worked in Washington, D.C., for then-Senator Corzine. She served as Legislative Counsel, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Planning, and finally as Chief of Staff. Howard advised the Senator on policy development, legislative strategy, constituent services, communications and personnel. She worked on legislation to expand access to prenatal care, increase federal funding to New Jersey health care providers, and protect the state’s Pharmaceutical Assistance to the Aged and Disabled program when the federal Medicare prescription program was implemented.

Howard earned her J.D. cum laude from New York University School of Law. Following law school, she served a judicial clerkship with Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Howard was then accepted into the U.S. Department of Justice’s Honors Program, where she worked as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division’s Health Care Task Force litigating health industry antitrust matters.

From 1990 to 1994, she was legislative assistant and policy adviser to Congresswoman Nita Lowey of New York.

Howard also earned a B.A. cum laude in History and Spanish from Duke University. She lives in Princeton with her husband and son.