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Aneesh Chopra

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53

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2016-01-04

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2016-01-04

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1

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1. “Telling, I'll leave you with this final thought, David, when the president spoke of Ferguson, his policy speech afterwards was to go to Camden, New Jersey, and what did he announce? Did he announce new money for police officers? Did he announce a new regulation to protect? No. He announced an open police data initiative. He flew to Camden to talk about open data as a policy lever to create transparency. So we're on the same page about what's happening in this social fabric. You would never have imagined a president of the United States issuing a policy that has nothing more or less than tapping into this expertise. And it says a lot about the tools that are in the toolkit for policymakers over the next decade. There's a lot we can do. We're just getting started, and I'm hopeful. It's going to happen at the federal level. It's going to happen at the state.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I got exposed to the muscles of cost-benefit analysis, understanding political dynamics to get to legislative success. The muscles in the gym we worked out were these traditional policy levers. And I think the takeaway from our conversation is that there's a new muscle that needs to be worked out. And that's understanding the role of technology, data, and innovation can play in problem solving. As another muscle we need to work out. And I think with the event we're doing tonight with the Civic Hackathon that you guys had sponsored, the idea that the American people can come together to join in problem solving using these new muscles gives me such hope that even if we've got congressional gridlock and we can't see another major piece of legislation happen for a little while in the future, we can do so much to make health, energy, education markets work better just by exercising this muscle.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “It's an exciting time solving problems. In the problem solving business, the point I'd make to you, David, and I want to applaud you for what you've done with the IOP here at the University of Chicago.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “No, no. The message resonated. And so, you know, you look at the reaction. And yes, I did a tough, I had a tough run. Older white women went to my opponent like 75, 25 or something. But not because I think they were against what I was saying. It's that he was fighting for women's rights. Remember the transvaginal ultrasound was the fight in Virginia. And so there was a rationale for why the vote fell the way it did. Look, we've got decades ahead of us and a lot to do to fix the country. And I do believe in laboratories of democracy, states are going to be the place where this is going to happen. I'm intending to be as active as I can. And the governor just yesterday asked me to take on the council on Virginia's future. And we're going to work on this making the workforce system work better for people. So we're going to set up a program that allows employers to communicate what they're looking for and to have schools and universities respond faster to the demand and to make sure that job seekers”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Absolutely. This is such an exciting era. So running and losing is just as empowering as, you know, I don't know if it's as empowering. It's obviously less than if you won. But the conversations I would have with folks that I normally wouldn't meet in my techie life really gave me a perspective about where we have problems and challenges where we got to focus our energies. And I was shocked at just the reaction. If you go to some of the toughest towns in Virginia, I may have won sixty, seventy percent. If I spoke to a local mayor of a community, the moonshine capital of the East Coast is Franklin County, Virginia. I carried that county north of the right.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I don't know about all that. You can play a football team without ever leaving your. You're right. No fear of concussion on the child, right? You can be safe and competitive.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “24 by 7. So what will happen is the child will leave the classroom. And on their digital checkout from the classroom, a mom, a guidance counselor, the local four H center where the kid goes after school can digitally reconnect with that child and they'll pick up the learning just as they left. So as an example, if I find myself struggling with fractions and proportions, but I want to play a game when I get home, I can connect that game to my child's performance data, and they may tee up aspects of the game that will effectively help my kid understand the concepts that they struggled with in the classroom, and that then the teacher will find out how far I've progressed so by the time the teacher hands back on gets the handoff from the digital services in the home to the teacher in the classroom, they'll be able to understand exactly where this kid is and where they aren't. So you'll have much more personalized instruction, personalized tutoring, personalized intervention because we're going to have these.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I know. My goodness, how challenging. Yeah. But that's the point. Every doctor, every patient, every nurse in theory today can have basically a secure email account where they can participate on the health internet.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Out there on the internet. Absolutely. It is. And in fact, this is another example where governments played a very important role. You know, Facebook and Twitter allow you to open up your information and protect it, usernames and passwords, and we're reasonably good about it. But you're not going to have your life unless you're a celebrity. Susceptible to hacking. Anyone could grab your email. Well, in less than ninety days, we challenged the private sector, developed more secure standards, secure version of email where I can identify exactly who the sender is, exactly who the receiver is, and I can encrypt the message in between. And in less than 90 days, we had a prototype of what a secure email foundation would look like. And now it's in regulation for every doctor.”

   2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Healthcare organizations that provide those recommendations to me. Right now, doing so will be at your peril if you're a hospital because you're going to lose revenue. Whereas if you're going to be a part of the future, making sure that people get the care in the right setting that lowers the cost, you get to share in that savings.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “It gave rise to an industry that were called fiduciaries, right? Brokers, vanguard, fidelity for the masses. I don't have to have that PhD in healthcare data or to have a smartphone or to have any of these sort of modern tools. All I have to do is hand the proverbial key of all my information to the person I trust whose then job it is to provide me that information back. It might be a phone call that I wasn't expecting that reminds me to do something, but what it allowed that phone call to happen was this digital connectivity, the internet working in the background. And so in health, in energy and education, information will flow to where we think and have the highest and greatest use. And that might mean for me personally that I'm trusting someone else to do that work for me because our system allows for that. The President's Affordable Care Act actually will reward”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “So, the best way to think about this is when the country went from pension plans to 401ks, we democratized information and gave people the ability to make choices on their own. But not everybody went and got their PhD in finance to sort out what stocks to buy.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Physical therapist before you see that orthopedic surgeon, because chances are people like you get back on your feet because this can really work the issue out without you having to have a surgery you didn't need. So on healthcare, we're going to see people advised, if you will, to get care at the right time and in the right location and hopefully at a much better price. So that's the healthcare piece.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Make America great. So let's take three healthcare first. The average American will get the right care in the right setting at the right time. The net effect of that is that we'll save about a third of the healthcare spend because of essentially better value in the system. Why? If I know and my digital advisor that's like my friendly advisor, if you will, can anticipate the next step in my healthcare journey. They might influence, you know what, you might want to seek a telemedicine consult to check on something that if you let linger for another couple days might manifest into something that requires you to be admitted to the hospital. Let's get it early so we can treat you before you get that more difficult outcome. So we're going to have these advisors that we're going to entrust with all of our health information that are going to mine that information and say, gosh, we think you should get that checkup or you should come in for that additional, oh, you've got back pain. We think you should see.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Having a sight that works doesn't solve the problem of what plan do you pick. You got to have these growing number of services that can say, hey, for you and your family, for the medications you've been on and what we think you might be on given your chronic condition, here's the plan that's right for you. That kind of advisor, recommendation service, that's what's coming. And I think that's really the excitement of what the president's now done with all this.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “But what happens is they found a startup called Stride Health that said, hey, we're going to take the raw information from healthcare.gov and we're going to bring our own intelligence and data mining and so forth, we can help give you a single cost estimator. Forget all this deductible premium, co-pay, coinsurance language, which is very alarming for people. What does all this mean? They say, hey, here's your estimated cost for you, for who you are, for the expected expenses you're going to incur in health care. Here's your estimated cost. And they're going to compete on providing a better estimator. And if people choose better plans because tools like Stride and others are available, it's an example of how the Internet allows us to connect resources in new and clever ways. The average senior on Medicare Part D is leaving $500 on the table because they pick the wrong plan.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yes. Yes. Well, but what's fascinating is what's happened now. We've leapfrogged. So the heart of what I've been thinking about is the line between the government and the private sector and the nonprofit community is blurring when it comes to these digital services. So not only can you shop now on healthcare.gov, but if you can't figure out which plan is right for you, there are dozens of alternative places. You can go. That might give you a recommendation. So I mentioned the fact that Uber surveyed their drivers and found that like 60% of them said, even though I can shop on healthcare.gov, I don't know which plan to pick. It's complicated. If shopping for health insurance is complicated. So rather than just say go try harder.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “No, it was very depressing. Saw this thing unfold? Heartbreaking Heartbreaking because so many of the principles that the president put forward on how we were supposed to modernize the government just weren't followed. And it was disheartening and everything is about what could I have done differently? What was I supposed to do? What could I have done to influence this? How did I fail our president? We all have a sense of failure. Now, truthfully, I was out in 2012 to leave and run for office. So the bulk of this activity really was kind of in that time, you know, post my departure.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Two out of the five states we wrote checks for. We gave $200 million of checks to states within six months of the law getting passed. Two of the states were Oklahoma and Kansas. They had elections, David, in November of 2010. Mary Fallon was elected in Oklahoma, and Sam Brownback was elected in Kansas. They took the checks that we gave them that their teams begged for so they could build a better experience for the people of their states. And they literally ripped up those checks and said, go pound sand. People that had spent their time designing and proposing that they would do the engineering work.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “No, no, no, no. So let me, you know, this is the challenge of hindsight, if you will. So David, one bit of contextual history. We were involved at the White House level in 2010 or early 2011. The theory was let's fund the states to do the initial software development. If you remember, the idea was each state would have their own exchange. The feds would be responsible for this hub where you could confirm the citizenship status and the tax estimator and so forth. But the challenge was the states were supposed to actually prototype some of this stuff and the feds were going to maybe backfill or do some secondary work off of these exchanges. The states basically threw up their hands as you recall.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Well, but here's the good When the Affordable Care Act was signed in March, our first deliverable was healthcare dot gov in July. It was not the version that was selling the good plans, it was a window on top of the bad plans that could discriminate against you and upcharge you.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “So, you know, this is an interesting policy question, which is, you know, obviously, as you know, from the White House perch, we didn't get involved, never get involved in procurement decisions at the agency level. And so, you know, I'm sure there was a lot of debate about, you know, what would be a better governance model around the exchange, the notion of a CEO who had authority to make these decisions and so forth. That's been plenty debated, but here's the good. There was a version of healthcare.gov.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Was only up and running 91% of the time. That meant two hours out of every day the system was down. It was now 99 plus percent up and running. It used to take many seconds to process an internet transaction down to milliseconds, so far better performance, dramatically lower cost.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Of course, it's the procurement problem. You can't blame the agency. They had to get it up and running relatively quickly. If they'd started from scratch, David, it'd have been two to three years before they could even get permission to write the first line of code. They wanted to get going, and so they said, okay, I'll use a pre-qualified list and hope that these folks know what they're doing. And to give you an example of the math, in order to get a username and a password set up on the healthcare.gov site, the first term, the team spent almost a quarter of a billion dollars just to stand up the ability to set up a username and a password. That had a $50 million annual maintenance fee just on that login process. Well, after the disaster and the SWAT team came in and the folks that have experience with the internet had the chance to get in there and participate, they rebuilt that system for $4 million with maybe a quarter of a million dollar annual maintenance, a system that”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Literally, the president, before he ran for office and may have, you know, based on maybe the time you guys were chatting about the possibility of him running. Medicare had done a procurement to find companies capable of providing IT services to them that had never envisioned the idea of an exchange, but were just on a list of pre qualified vendors. So when the president was successful and signed the Affordable Care Act into law, CMS turned to that pre qualified list of vendors, not to the list of people who had experienced building health insurance exchanges.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “You'll go from permit to plug in in seven days. So, David, if that works and we can cut a billion dollars of savings out of the cost of solar, instead of fighting over with Congress to add a billion dollar subsidy program, which would never get through this crazy house, what would that mean for society? And so that's a bigger idea, but there are lots of smaller ideas. Hundreds of agency problems have been solved in novel and clever ways because of the challenge construct of the presidents.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “It's the soft cost, the customer financing, the customer acquisition, basically the permitting and the interconnection fees. So we put up a challenge in the end of the first term, a $10 million prize if mayors, utilities, and installation teams can somehow work together to get those costs down. And what's amazing, David, is that in the last month or two, they've announced five teams have pre qualified to now get to the final rounds of this competition, to get to a seven day permit to plug in timeframe. I was on the phone earlier today with the Pacific Gas and Electric PG&E, the IT leader, who's supporting, not fighting but supporting the teams by saying we're going to create web connections and use the internet so we can make it easier for folks if you want to buy a home.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Oh, there are many examples. And so I'll give you one that's an active discussion right now. We have a billion dollar hidden tax against Industry not a subsidy for the industry attacks against the industry, and its attacks that's measured by bureaucracy. It's called the soft costs. That is to say, if you benchmarked the United States against Germany, the cost of buying the solar panels and the labor costs of installing them are roughly the same. Germany in aggregate is about a billion dollars cheaper on a perfect if you calculated the full math. What accounts for the difference?”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Great idea to respond to a problem the agencies have put forward on challenge.gov, the best idea wins. And so we're celebrating the fifth year anniversary, the Harvard Kennedy School ranked it the most innovative government program for the year in which they were graded. And we're establishing.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Freedom of Information Act, forgive me for the acronyms. And it is still true that for many journalists who are trying to get information, that traditional model is frustrating. But on the tech side, we've now taken a lot of those previously, you had to request the information to make it public to now it's public by default. There are literally a hundred thousand data sets on data.gov, and really there's a whole playbook that's been evolved. You open up the government data, you work with the private industry to lower the barriers to entry and how you can use the data in combination with other sources to make health, energy, and education markets work better. We've now celebrated this week, David, the fifth year anniversary of challenge.gov. The president reminds us always that the talent in our society is not limited to Washington. You can have great ideas in the country. Well, challenge.gov means you don't have to have a PhD in government procurement to participate with Washington.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “It's a new default. How different are things dramatically different? So if you take a look at the default setting now, agencies are effectively publishing data by default. It used to be that you'd have to ask them for information. The reporters would often call this the FOIA problem. I apply for a FOIA. I don't know if I'm going to get the data.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “The Immigration Portal that was launched ninety days after the president asked us to work on it was the highest customer satisfaction rating for Hispanic Americans highest customer satisfaction rating of any government website. I mean it's mind boggling to think that you know folks would think of the immigration department as a place of excitement and service, right? It's not normally what you'd anticipate. But it was the mindset that the internet has opened up in the private sector that we brought to bear. And it was all government employees, maybe a few contractors, but very limited budget, small teams of passionate people who just were unshackled for the first time because they were given the freedom to open up this information to people because frankly the president said that's the new default in government.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Would you like fries? And more importantly, we demystified what it takes to have an application. So we said, how many steps does an application go through? And they said, well, 200 plus steps. Well, we got them to agree that there's only seven major steps that the application goes through. So why don't we disclose on the website you're in step one? Here's the estimated time to step two. Here's what's needed to make sure that you can cross over to step three. So you demystify. You open up the data. David, the customer satisfaction ratings came out”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Otherwise, that could be a really sign up for the assignment to learn. Yeah, well, we signed up for the assignment. And the reason was the agency was in the middle of a billion dollar IT modernization project, David. When we went over there and said, hey, what can we do in 90 days? They were sort of like, what? We're just in the middle of this huge 10-year IT project. took these principles that have animated the way the internet operates and we said look let's start with the data let's open up the data and it's an interesting story what did we do in 90 days we produced a site that flipped the model upside down it used to be you'd have to call or your lawyer would have to call the immigration department what's the status of my application it's like calling a black box they won't respond i wait on hold for hours i don't really know what's going on we said hey what if we flipped it upside down what if it was like burger king have it your way um would you like us to text message you if your application”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Calls a meeting and says, Look, the president's going to meet with Senator John McCain tomorrow about immigration was the topic. And I think there was some discussion about, well, we thought it might have been some policy discussion coming out of it, but that may not result in something. Are there areas in which we can improve the way our immigration system works for people? Because to your point of effective and efficient government, it's not the most friendly experience, even if you're trying to do the right thing and come in and participate legally. And so President walked out of the meeting with Senator McCain and said, in 90 days, I'm going to transform the way the American people interact with our immigration department. And I challenge my CTO, my CIO, my chief performance officer. And at the very same time, he kind of put...”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “About the state of affairs? Well, look, I came out of state government where we were still running 20 year old, 30-year-old pieces of software. And so I was attuned to the challenges. And we really embraced the president's vision of bottom-up change. And so our core philosophy was if we could start opening up the data in the government and allow anyone, whether they be government employees or nonprofits or even businesses or outsiders, to connect to that data in new and clever ways, they may be more interesting and innovative than if we got the agencies to change their direction on the dime. And to crystallize this small example, I think I had to be approved by the Senate, right? So the Senate approved the president's nomination of me late May. And within two weeks, the chief of staff ron”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Become my secretary of technology. Now, you're right. The U.S. government didn't have a chief technology officer, but Virginia, under a Republican governor in the late 80s, late 90s, was the first to become Championed the country's first cabinet position for technology and government. The hint is he's a candidate for president this year.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “That we made available. So by the time we had reached some level of maturity, the company had gone public, Governor Warner asked me to basically serve on the Medicaid board and to think about electronic health records. He put a little task force together. And I got that flavor, that policy could play a major role in getting these questions answered. What would it take to transform the delivery system? How do we unleash the power of the internet? It wasn't just buying a piece of software. We had technology challenges, policy challenges, business model challenges. It was going to require a public policy debate. And so at the end of that journey, Governor Warner was very kind to say, you might want to take a 4A into this and introduce me to Senator Kane, then Governor Kane, and said, you might want to consider putting him in the cabinet. And he was kind enough to reach out and say, let's focus on electronic health records and electronic delivery of veterans benefits and thinking about education in new ways.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Technology So I joined a firm in Washington, DC called the Advise Board, actually to connect the dots. Jeff Zionts, who the president named to be chief performance officer before heading up the NEC, hired me. He was the president of the company at the time. And they focused on research and best practices for the healthcare sector. And so I joined the team to write books, to write studies that were looking at the strategic challenges facing healthcare and had the pleasure of helping craft our first foray into the role that the internet would play in healthcare built off of my master's thesis, built off the bus ride. And so we as a company began talking about the potential of technology and healthcare, and we began incorporating technology in the services we provided. We began launching software products for hospitals and health systems, and we began to grow ourselves. We were commenting on the opportunity and then eating our own dog food, building those capabilities into services.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Well, now you try to be a car mechanic without understanding it software. There's more computing power in the average car today than took us to the moon. And so we're starting to see this intersection of technology into the jobs of what was previously the traditional middle class. And that is really both a challenge and an opportunity. Folks have to be educated in ways that they hadn't before, but it means many, many more opportunities for them to thrive even if they don't see themselves in the mirror as the next Bill Gates”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “And increasingly, you don't have to have a PhD in physics to get one of these jobs. One of the things we worked on when the president launched his summer jobs youth initiative, which was for disadvantaged youth in the first term, was we acknowledge that if you wanted to be a quality assurance technician, all you'd have to know is how to use mobile apps. You wouldn't have to have had even a two-year degree, let alone a four-year degree, in order to get into the tech industry. So quality assurance as one perspective of a tech job, you can make a hundred thousand dollars a year in this country testing applications, and your on-ramp to that job could literally be a certificate or a credential that you could get at a high school. So we've got to find a way to democratize what a quote technology job means. And in a sense, the debate we're having about career and technical education, which is, you know, the old days it was the Votech school that you went to be a plumber or an air conditioner or a mechanic.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “So that is the existential question. Now, we had a case study in Virginia when then governor Mark Warner before I joined Virginia's technology sector under successor Tim Kane. He had seen this challenge firsthand and said, what we're going to do is we're going to establish a public-private partnership to bring technology jobs not to Northern Virginia, which had plenty of technology jobs, but to bring technology jobs to southwest Virginia, really the Tennessee West Virginia, Kentucky, Nexus, if you will. And those were markets that could be near as cost effective as going overseas. In other words, the delta in cost between providing a tech job in India, which the wages are rising, and the opportunity in southwestern, you could actually build a viable alternative. You could grow technology jobs in areas that previously hadn't had exposure.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “You know, we are at this, you know, it's sort of like that Rorschach test. Well, this economy produced more jobs or less jobs, right? That's the big discussion that we're having. And in fact,”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Well, it was an example and an anecdote that was speaking to a larger story that this had potential. When you were traveling”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “You're like, man, this is not Nickel and Dime 5% improvement. We're talking 80, 90% improvement. And if we could unleash the full power of potential the internet and healthcare and energy and education and transportation, you know, a lot of that which forces us to be in their left-right divide, which is we want to provide access to important public goods, but they're really expensive. Gosh, if we could make those public goods more costly, cost effective. That is, if they could be 80, 90 percent cheaper, maybe we wouldn't have as much of a fight over whether or not we could collectively invest in some of these important infrastructure projects.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Well, I certainly felt that way I rode the M two shuttle bus with a young doctor by the name of John Halamka. That's a shuttle bus that takes it from the kind of Boston campus of Harvard the Medical School over to the Kennedy School. And he was just a”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “That's a funny line. Yeah, no, the idea here was that the internet was going to have an impact on society. And so when I went to the Kennedy school to study public policy, I focused my energy on how the Internet was going to affect the healthcare system. And you're right, health was my subject matter passion, but its ability to be transformed with technology, a topic the president obviously cared deeply about and did a lot for, you know, drew me into this intersection of technology and policy, technology and health.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “That's right Yeah, and in fact, my education was largely the internet was the bigger point. And that was, you know, I'd left college, went to Hopkins. I was at Morgan Stanley when we took Netscape public, and that was a moment in time where really the economic forces about the power and potential of the industry. nineteen ninety five. And that public offering. Oh, stop.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “There was definitely some polling we had studied about would that be an issue if raised the notion that my background is affiliated and I've been investing in companies and somehow there was some relationship between what organizations I'm affiliated with and this concept of Indian outsourcing was an issue in the academic sense, meaning it was people were worried about it. It really didn't come up much on the trail itself. I heard a little bit of this guy's all about outsourcing jobs to India. That would be on the social media channels more so than any other kind of stage or debate publicly. But I think it was very modest, but a presence.”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “It is true even on our side of the aisle, David, there are people who feel like they're middle class job is being replaced with an overseas worker or an immigrant that's come in temporarily to take their job only to have it then later transition. So we have a lot of resentment. Do you think that was a problem when you were”

    2016-01-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 20 - Aneesh Chopra · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source