YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Leavitt

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61
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2017-02-16
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2017-02-16
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “They're going to learn as they go, and they'll find that there's a reason that those things were done the way they were. Maybe we'll all learn some lessons from them too.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “These yourself as a governor, I have. And I've spent a lot of time studying and participating in the White House, and they're doing it differently. But look, that's their right. They will learn, I think it was Mark Twain who Made a kind of impolitic comment when he said a man will learn lessons he can learn no other way holding a cat by the tail. Be clear, I would never hold a cat by the tail, but it does give me an image.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I would be surprised if it functioned the way. Previous White House has, maybe they'll reinvent it and we'll all be emulating that model later. But I don't You've run a”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think a lot of the preparation that should have been done I think they have worked very hard since, and I think they've been able to a large extent. Keep up. But I don't think it will go down in history as a classical transition that people will emulate.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And I think at some point there will be a candidate who can bring that back together, but it will likely be a person who is not promising. Much bigger federal government.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Let's face it, I think a lot of people would say he was not the perfect candidate for that purpose. I think it's fascinating. I mean, we're sitting here in a school of political science. If we were having a lecture from a political science professor, he would say it was the elites versus the non-elites. The fascinating thing is that the non-elites chose Donald Trump to be their voice. It may be that he was the person who could express their frustration well enough. I can't reconcile all that. All I can say and believe is that at root, a nation is the aggregate of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the people of that country. And I believe that the American people were saying I want a functional government. I want a limited government. And both of those things are not true.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I worry deeply about it for the very same reason. But the reality is a nation. Is not just made by borders, it's made by the aggregate of the hearts of the people. And We as citizens owe an obligation here too, to demand that as opposed to demanding something else, because when the voice of the people moves someplace, our democracy responds. It responds in lots of unique and And sundry ways, but it responds. We're getting the government right now that we're creating. until we begin to demand people working together Maybe that's what this was about. Well, there is”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Those symbols can quickly attach themselves to the new people. It's a functionality in government. People want government to do things to make their lives better and to set the politics aside. I've been in it long enough, and you have too, to know that that's not something that simply comes when people agree to lay down their swords. It happens when people demand it long enough. And when people be rewarded at the ballot box, that's the last thing. We were as far from that right now in 2016 as we have ever been. Was it because of frustration or because they wanted more of it? I believe it was just out of frustration. They're going to try something different. But I think in the final analysis, what people want is functionality and to be allowed to live out their lives in a place where they can, where government plays its role.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I believe that a lot of what people are feeling is a lack of functionality in government. I tend to believe that's why people are, as opposed as they are about the ACAs, because it's become a symbol of a non-functional government.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And in between the seasons of the major sports, they would have odd sports. And one of them was a surfing competition in Hawaii with giant waves. And the commentator was. Talking about How it was scored and he pointed out that the surfers were out in the water With looking over their shoulder, and the reason was they were waiting for the right wave And he said, if you don't get the right wave, you can Have great skills, but never get to the beach. And I just think we have to acknowledge that what happened in 2016 was a was a wave that we that a lot of people don't understand and probably a lot of people like me don't fully understand it.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I know he's controversial. He seems like a Seems like a bona fide person who the president of the United States has chosen. And I think I'd be surprised if we didn't agree that a president deserves to have the people he appoints and then live with the consequence. I like the fact that he... Views states as an important tool, I think I like the fact that he talks a bit about balance, and I think he deserves a chance to be there, and the president will bear the burden or the benefit of his service.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Listen I ran the Environmental Protection Agency for a time, and so I learned a lot. I was governor for a time, and everyone would come to me and talk to me about the science. And what I learned very early was to ask the question, who's science? Because science is not, does not lack competition. And there are people who will maintain that they have science on their side on both sides.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And so it turns out that a lot of the attacks for and against all those commodities in the way they're used tend to be based on the politics that you're trying to develop in a coalition to gain power. That has nothing to do with the science of it. It has nothing to do with the economics of it. It has a lot to do with the politics of it. And so if you're trying to solve an environmental problem, getting down to the science of it and looking at it on an open-minded basis and not just attacking industry segments, and then twenty years later attacking a different one and adopting it, how can you defend that? You can't, other than the fact that it turns out to be all mixed up in the... This politics”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think I would have a chapter that would be titled Water. Coal, corn, and sugar Because when you begin to look at the equation of two hundred seventy electoral votes and you begin to look at the impact that Commodities have in the context of presidential politics. It's profound”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “But the politics of it is that at one point the politics was against nuclear and now they're against coal. And in my mind, we ought to be measuring the result as opposed to just attacking specific industries. People who have the sort of all other approach, there's a recognition that there's good and bad and pluses and minuses. And if you're going to have an energy policy, why eliminate sources of energy if you can get them as clean as possible? on balance better. Now I'm not here to make the case for coal. I'm just saying that”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You go back twenty five years ago when I was first in politics the word nuclear was a terrible word. No one wanted anything to do with nuclear energy. And emphasized all the bad things that could occur. Now it's seen as a relatively clean form and it can be used to do away with coal. During the time when I was head of the EPA, we were On the coal businesses to come up with large new cleaning devices where they could take the pollution out of the air and they felt oppressed because we were requiring them to put these scrubbers on at literally billions of dollars of expense.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “You get a better and more equitable outcome. Now I think there are ways in which you could turn those words cap and trade into an entirely different system than what I'm trying to describe for you, and I suspect that that's where the debate comes, is that we often adopt one another's words and then make it something else. You can call it cap and trade, then make it a very compulsive system. But in the pure sense of where you're using market economies to systematically drive down the amount of pollution allowed into the environment It's much more, it will produce a better result than if you simply have the government deciding arbitrarily how to reduce the pollutants because it's a ham-handed approach.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “For the life of me, I don't understand how. cap and trade become What it has politically. I mean, to me, it's a market based solution and it's, again, I've spent more time thinking about healthcare than I have the environment. I think a well executed cap and trade system makes more sense than a system where the government simply steps in and decides pollutes and who doesn't.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “of the Environmental Protection Agency, I participated in the development of what was referred to as Global Earth Observation, I think it was called GEOS, and I'll get the acronym wrong, but it's a system of satellites and weather stations and ships and others that are tracking things that are happening around the globe and that we have as a family of nations found a way to essentially monitor the temperature of the earth and the weather patterns together. If you can create something that elaborate, You can solve these problems, but it does require a collaborative spirit, not a gaming spirit, and one of the dilemmas we've faced is that not everybody keeps their commitments like the Americans do.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “That's, I think, one of the problems over the course of a 50-year history is the United States does keep its commitments. Not everybody else does. I was at dinner one night with one of the senior ministers of science in China. I ask him, this was actually before I was in the federal government. I was governor at the time, and he said, People have an economy. We don't So when we get an economy, come back and talk to me then. That's where this gets all fouled up in international trade politics. And I'm not suggesting, I frankly have not studied the Paris Accords enough. I spend most of my time thinking about healthcare, so I don't know, to be honest, I'm not in a position to express a. Well grounded opinion, but I do know that I have seen international cooperation done well. While I was”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “The degree to which we know what to do about it is less certain. But it gets all mixed up in international politics and trade policy and all kinds of other things. And so in my view, if you can focus on solving the problems that you know. and certainly climate change is one of them Then I think you can make progress.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And the other said, Save the earth, kill yourself And I thought to myself, there's got to be someplace in between that. That makes more sense than either of those, and yet that's the way we talk about the environment in the philosophically. And there's no real place in the political debate for finding the balance between sustainability and development. And I think that ought to be the objective of policy thinkers is to find that balance. And I think that's true. I was engaged often in this discussion with our friends and trading partners around the world when I was the head of the EPA and when I was governor. And there's something to be said for the fact that there's clearly a problem here. Let me restate that. There's clearly a problem. The Earth's surface is clearly getting warmer. Certainly human beings have something to do with that.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And we tend to symbolize a person's position based on where they are, what the words they use on. on climate change. I came to understand that there was no political philosophy for balance in the environment. I remember once while I was head of the EPA pulling up into an intersection and seeing two bumper stickers one said Earth first will mine the other planets later”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “In the hand of the Secretary, and they can likely give the states the flexibility they need through that mechanism. They're also going to have budget challenges, every Congress does, but in this case they're looking at a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure, looking at rebuilding the military. And if you begin to say, how am I going to get money to do that, you can't reduce Medicaid too much because you've got the problem I just described, they're likely to take a lot of the same dollars and find ways to more systematically spread them across a larger group of people.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “While there will be changes in Medicaid, it will likely be, they have a dilemma in Congress. They have a lot of states that have expanded Medicaid already who have Republican governors. They have a group of Republican governors who didn't and are considered good soldiers in the fight. Now they're not in a position where they're able to say to them, well, you didn't do anything, so we're going to just leave you out of the money. They have to do something that will allow states to sort of equalize the benefit. And I believe what they will end up doing is that they will realize that the whole idea of block grants is probably unnecessary because there's a lot of authority through the ACA that's now.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “If there was a lesson I learned as Secretary of Health, it would be that if you want to transform healthcare you have to change Medicare because it's the only payment system that exists the same in every village, hamlet and city and state in America. And it drives many of the other payment systems. So we ultimately have to deal with Medicare. I doubt it will be this year because of the weight of what's being dealt with with the With the so-called repeal and replace legislation, Medicaid will be because it's such a big part of it. Now, I've been through this three times in the last twenty years as governor and as Secretary of Health, and I can give the block grant speech as well as anyone in America. But I think as a practical matter,”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I work as much as I'm asked, which is fairly regularly with members of the leadership in Congress and D. When Tom Price nominated and confirmed or he has been nominated when he's confirmed, I suspect I'll have some involvement with them. I hope they'll ask because it would be a mistake not to ask people what happened before. And that's one of the things that often in a democracy we don't do enough of”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “There will be enough change on what's there that the Republicans can properly have a list of things they repealed, and there will be some things that they'll say they replaced. But look, I just think the reality of this is that what we're going to see is a political process that will produce change. It will iterate where the parties come down and how they define it will depend on where they stand.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I think we, first of all, have to just acknowledge that words matter and they matter to different people for different reasons. And we fight over words a lot more than we ought to. The Republicans right now want to fight on repeal and replace. The Democrats want to fight that it not happen. Well, the reality is when it gets right down to it, Republicans are going to call whatever they do, repeal and replace. And when they get down to what they can actually get done, it's likely to be there will be some new things. But for the most part, it's going to be finding ways to make more functional. That which we had before the ACA or that we have after. And then we'll have a fight about what actually happened and who deserves a credit. But I have a much, I think if you say.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Act in a responsible way and solve some of the deficiencies of the affordable care act, and there are some, they will in fact be rewarded. Now, the question will be, will they overreach? They've got to have Democratic votes in the Senate. And so at some point in time, this will follow the same pattern it always follows, and that is that they will overreach initially, and then there'll be some pushback, and then the big question is, will the pressure be great enough or will it happen soon enough that the politics of this won't take over, they could make some very good adjustments and we could mark forward as a society far better served?”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “But it's clearly being driven by an economic imperative that we have as a country. There's no place on the economic leaderboard A country that spends twenty five percent of its gross domestic product on healthcare. We have to fix this. And I think as the pressure for that intensifies. The reality will, the emergency will become greater. Now, you ask about my view on the Republicans. I think the Republicans have a profound opportunity. If they will.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It started before Bill Clinton and it's being driven by something other than politics. It's being driven by economic imperatives that we have as a country. That's the critical thing to understand is that this is not being driven by politics. It's being guided at times by politics. It's being affected by politics.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Well, there are lots of people who say it, but having been in politics, I know the value of a good phrase. And the Republicans dined out for three elections in a row on the idea of repeal and replace. And I think it's to be expected that there will be a bill that will be titled Repeal and Replaced. And that's probably about the only thing we know with certainty What we don't know is how the word repeal be defined and how will the word replace be defined. And again, I think if you look at this in the context of history and say that we are 25 years into a forty year process, this didn't start with Barack Obama.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and said to them Do you folks have anything that would help us bend the cost curve? And I know they had to have said, yes, we have a lot of things that we've been working with or working to accomplish the last four years. There's a lot of demonstration projects on this thing called value-based care. And the reason that, and they basically just put them in the statute. That was developed during the second term of George W. Bush. Now, we don't think of the ACA having anything that's bipartisan, but the reality is exchanges were an idea that had been to a large extent thought of as Republican idea. The whole idea of value payment was not new. It was something that we had been working hard on. And those are the things that for the most part have endured.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “All the incentives are misplaced. I have said at times it's like a disease chronic more. Everybody gets does better with more, and that's not good for the system. If you want to make more money as a healthcare provider, just do more procedures. If you're a consumer and And you're not paying for it, then why not just get more? And so the system has to change or the problem won't be resolved. And I think the Affordable Care Act at least begin to acknowledge the fact. Now I want to say this. That was in the Affordable Care Act. But I know with some certainty that the writers of the bill Said, we can't just go about getting everybody insured. We have to do something to change the cost curve. And they went to CMS.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And we have moved in that direction. And I think that ought to be acknowledged. In fact, I look at the Affordable Care Act and if you were to ask me what I think its biggest contribution has been, aside from just getting us started, I think it has given great momentum to the idea that we need to change the way we pay for healthcare. That alone, over the course of a decade or two, will be among the most significant contributions that any period could make.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Always of the same thing happening, and that is the party coming into power will overreach, and they tend not to get as much done as they could. I think there are things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. We started with the fact that people ought to have insurance. I think you can get them to agree that coordinated care is a lot better than uncoordinated care. I think you can get them to agree that the way we pay for health care is wrong and that we ought to change it away from this, what we call the fee-for-service system to whom Something whether working on value And I think there's.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Well, it's certainly what shapes our views. I mean, I observed, and I'm sure you did, that what drives Washington is two things. Preparation for the next election and maintaining control of the news cycle. And both sides believe fervently that the other side won't do the right thing and therefore they ought to have nothing happen until they become in control and then they will certainly do the right thing. And so you end up then...”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Who pays and who decides? And in the context of the Democrat version, it's typically they'll go a lot deeper in terms of who matters and who pays. They're willing to shift income from one to the other and who decides they'll have the federal government decide. The Republicans will likely not apply it to as many people. They will have the state government or consumers making decisions and they'll have less shifting of income. But it's not a difference in our view of what ought to be done. And I think that's the foundation on which progress will always be made is building on the things that you agree on.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “That's mostly the role of government, which is actually what A lot of this boils down to. It isn't a Difference in aspiration. It's a question of what's the role of government and the ACA as well as what had been proposed in the 90s had a lot of government involvement and a lot of government decision making. I mean, I have observed over time as a Scholar of political thought that these things boil down to really three questions Who matters?”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Ultimately, what happened in the ACA is that they compromised. Not a lot's made of that, but we had a situation where they said every state can have its own. And if you want to have one like Hillary Clinton design, do it. If you want to have one like the Heritage Foundation, then do it. What's the difference?”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And two or so, the Heritage Foundation came up with a concept they called an exchange. The Democrats hated that because it was a Republican idea and they killed it. And then you go forward to 2009 or 2010. The writers of the ACA did a kind of clever thing. They took the Democrat idea that Hillary Clinton had put forward. They took the Republican name of an exchange and they put it into the bill. And what we had was a disagreement over whether it ought to look like what the heritage foundation had designed.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I have believed that It's a market based idea. If you look at the history of this, you'll see that the first exchange conversation actually took place in the 70s with Richard Nixon. And then you roll forward until the Clinton health reform, where they had what they called, I think called a regional co-op with exchanges. The Republicans hated that, and they ultimately defeated it. 2000,”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “And outside the politics, if you can come back to the kind of Google Earth view of this, there's progress being made. We're iterating through different political periods, but there's progress that's being made.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I would have done a lot of things differently. But the fact is, they passed a bill. And since that time, there have been a lot of changes that have occurred. Some have been intended, some have not. But I think you have to look at health reform not as a four-year or an eight-year or a 12-year proposition. I think we're actually 25 years into a 40-year transition. And that what happened in the Affordable Care Act was important because it allowed change to start. Now we're going to go through another iteration of change, I think, over the next few years or however long this process lasts. But it will build, I think, to a large extent on the chassis that was built because there are things that Republicans”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Let me start with what I think is the most important part of the Affordable Care Act, and that is that something happened. The system had been in gridlock for so long that there was it was hard to get the molecules to move in a way that could create any kind of, I'm speaking of the figuratively.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “About the importance of quality and cost, not just cost, not just quality, but the combination of quality and cost. And people refer to that as value. And I think that's why so much of our discussion today is centered around that intersection.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Engineer the development of the benefits just a bit differently. I'll take the savings and I'll apply it into a network that can cover more people. We'll give everyone something that we would consider to be credible coverage as opposed to giving a few substantially better with an aspiration that someday everybody will get the best. And it worked. And then we began to focus on quality and recognizing that the least expensive healthcare is generally the best care. That is to say you're doing things at the right time in the right way. I had the benefit as governor of having a great healthcare system that was quite dominant in the area called Intermountain. It's well respected. And there are other systems that do things similar, but It was very early in the process when I began to learn.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I believe there's a widely held aspiration in America for everyone to have access to an affordable insurance policy. I don't think that divides us. I think that unites us how we go about it is a bit different. The way I expanded it in Utah is, I think, interesting and somewhat relevant to this day. I observed that as we were expanding Medicaid, for example, that there were certain of those populations that were getting benefits that went well beyond what a person who was working at a mill or at a car dealership might have. And so I went to the federal government and said, if you'll let me...”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Well, I ran for governor in nineteen ninety two, of course you'll remember that was the year Bill Clinton was elected, and healthcare was a big issue. And I'll be honest, I did not see it. As a candidate, but it became evident to me I needed to learn more about it. That was natural for me because of my risk management background, but I dug into it and found it to be an issue that I found enormously interesting. I concluded that ultimately the approach that was being taken nationally was not the right approach, meaning, and I'm not talking about the policy of it, I'm talking about the mechanics of how you get it done, rather than try to pass it all in one bill, I felt that there was a better way to approach it, and we laid out a blueprint in 1993, and then every year for the next five years we added to the blueprint or we completed part of it. And so we did a lot of the things in the nineties that the Affordable Care Act did. We expanded coverage to age twenty six. We dealt with a lot of the rating issues.”

    2017-02-16 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 122 - Mike Leavitt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source