Edwina Rogers

Edwina Clifton Rogers (born May 27, 1964) has served in public policy positions in the US Senate, White House, private, and international sectors for over twenty years. She has worked for two presidents and four senators, and founded or directed lobbying firms for public health issues. From 2012 to 2014, she was the executive director of the Secular Coalition for America. and CEO of the Global Healthspan Policy Institute, a 501c3 nonprofit think tank working to support research and development of new treatments to address the underlying causes of diseases of aging.

Background and Education

Edwina Rogers grew up in rural Alabama when it was primarily a Southern Democratic state. She attended the University of Alabama on scholarship and received her BS in Corporate Finance, then went on to law school at The Catholic University of America (CUA), earning her J.D. while working several jobs. Rogers was a Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard during 1996.

In 1989, she married Ed Rogers, a protege of political strategist Lee Atwater who served in two administrations and founded a lobbying firm with former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. The couple lived in an 18,000-square-foot mansion in McLean. The couple divorced in 2012. In 2016 she married American psychologist Greg Neimeyer.

Career

White House

After graduation from law school,

She served as the founding executive director of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative from 2006-2011, a Washington DC trade association, responsible for the national Patient Centered Medical Home movement and implementing the model around the US. She was a supporter of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or, colloquially, Obamacare.

In answer to her skeptical critics, Rogers describes herself as "nontheist" and as a libertarian-leaning economic conservative who is also "laissez-faire on social issues".

Media appearances

Rogers has been a regular contributor of conservative newspaper columns, health and policy journals. Rogers appeared as a commentator twice a week on Fox News and more than once a day on MSNBC. and in 2008 she demonstrated for another television crew her signature gift-giving style, which involved cutting up sheets of dollar bills and using them as wrapping paper. She says she started doing this years ago, as a "cheap" and "unique" way of wrapping inexpensive gifts while still complying with ethics rules governing gift-giving in Washington.

Other work

She was a lobbyist for South Korea in the Middle East. She also served on the Board of Directors of Semco Energy, Inc. (NYSE: SEN) a natural gas distribution company until 2007.