Capital Public Radio host Jeffrey Callison sat down for an exclusive interview with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to discuss health care reform, as well as his thoughts on the presidential candidates.
Governor you’ve made health care a big priority and I know it’s a big priority for some of the key lawmakers. Assuming some big legislation comes out of this, how would you define success? What would you need to see in the legislation to be able to say, “Wow, we’ve done something big here.”
Schwarzenegger: I’ve made it very clear in my State of the State that we want to reform the broken health care system. We want to insure everybody. Have mandatory insurance and also make sure the insurance companies cover everybody. Which means no insurance companies should be able to turn anyone away because of age or because of medical history. That is the premise of the whole. If we have that then we can eliminate all of the other problems. But this is the key thing -- what we want to shoot for. And there are many ways of going there and getting there. The legislative leaders each one has a proposal on the table, Sheila Kuehl has a proposal on the table, we have our proposal on the table, we were going to put all of this together, the different proposals and put that in the mix and then negotiate.
How important for you are the private insurance companies in the health care industry?
Scawarzenegger: I think that it is a very important factor because we don’t believe that government should run healthcare because they have you know, had their day. They are running the healthcare system for our prisons and a federal judge had to take over. So that single payer idea or the government run program to me is not the area we want to go. We want to let the private market the private sector take care of it because they can do it much better. But we want to set the guidelines and make the rules.
Supporters of the single payer system would say that if there were a single payer it would remove the profit motive and remove multiple organizations making decisions.
Schwarzenegger: I totally understand in theory of what they’re trying to accomplish, and we appreciate their thinking and thinking you know, of coming up with different ways then what we have now to fix the problem. So this is all terrific, the only thing is we have not seen one run well. And we have our own, as I have said earlier, in our prison system the government runs it, and it has been disastrous. And these are people -- 172,000 prisoners -- who are locked up they cannot even go outside and shop around for a better deal. So we have locked up people ,we have a captive audience right there and they could not pull that off and a federal judge has to. It’s just that government is really not equipped to do those kinds of things. And I think that uh we have seen it all over the world, government programs don’t work. People in places have to go and wait for a month to get surgery and to get medical attention. I mean we have a plan and ours will work, everyone is insured, have mandatory insurance, and have insurance companies cover everyone. And the other important thing with ours is that people should be shared responsibility that everyone should participate. If it is hospitals, doctors, employers, local government, state government, federal government, everyone has to participate and then it can work.
Employers would still play an important part if your plan were to be enacted. But there are critics who say that connecting employment to health insurance is a problem in itself. Why not sever that link?
Schwarzenegger: Well because we know there are a lot of companies that right now cannot afford health care and want to provide health care for their workers. And there’s other companies that are providing healthcare and discontinuing with the health care coverage, because the health care costs are going up by double digit numbers. As a matter of fact we have met so many business leaders who have been telling us their insurance has gone up and the health care costs have gone up by 25-percent a year. The health care system in California is in a disastrous situation. It reminds me very much on workers comp situation. When I came into office that’s one thing we reformed right away. And people were saying why don’t you do it this way? And why don’t you take that approach and we have tried it before and it didn’t work. There were many, many reasons why we shouldn’t have done it. But we did it. Democrats and Republicans came together and we did it. And now not only do we have 25-percent drops in workers comp costs, we have 50-percent drops in workers comp costs -- double. And we have an additional 16-percent drop this year. So this was a huge success. And basically with health care we want to do the same thing.
I know there are millions of uninsured people in California if everyone were to be insured under your plan, then someone’s going to have to find an awful lot of money to pay the bills for those people, where’s that money going to come from?
Schwarzenegger: Well people are paying and buying their insurance. We will have insurance policies that are $100-and $150. That you can get right now – insurance policies for $100. Then on top of that we will have companies put four percent into the pot of the wages, and we will have hospitals put four percent in of their earnings, we will have doctors put in two-percent of it. The federal government has already guaranteed $3.7 billion dollars in matching funds. So we will create a pool out of that. What we want to do is cover those who can’t afford health care like people at 250-percent poverty or below. So they will be taken care of. So we want to make sure that everyone gets covered and that everyone gets a chance to also work on prevention, which right now no one is taking care of. If it’s our program that we recommend that means the prevention will be free. That you can get your check-ups so you don’t get sick in the first place. Because that’s really where the action is, which is not a part of it right now at all.
You mention the doctors and the hospitals and how they would be contributing financially under your plan, but I know that there are doctors and hospitals who say, “Hey, we shouldn’t be contributing to this system.” Why should they?
Schwarzenegger: We totally understand them saying that. You will never have everyone agree on everything. There’s no such thing. We want to make sure when the whole thing is done… when we have our health care system reform, that everyone will pay less. That is the ultimate goal here. Everyone has to pay less. Let’s take hospitals for example. Right now hospitals get stuck with unpaid bills because of the uninsured. There will be no such thing anymore. So they will benefit that everyone is insured and they get paid. Doctors and those that deal with Medi-Cal patients will get much more money because now we will put $4 billion into the Medi-Cal system and therefore doctors will get the money that they deserve. So everyone will benefit from that. One of the most important things that you have to remember is that right now we have 6.5 million people uninsured. And someone has to pay for those uninsured. And it is the insured people -- you and me…we are paying for the uninsured people. So I don’t think that’s fair because all of our costs have we’re paying for health care has a hidden tax and you don’t even know it. If you pay your premiums, it’s higher. If you pay co-pays it’s higher, your deductibles are higher, out of pocket expenses are higher. Everything is higher. The private sector – the businesses are paying $14.7 billion in hidden taxes.
Schwarzenegger: I came into this job to lower the taxes, not to increase the taxes. So we want to lower the $14.7 billion and we want to lower what you pay and I pay and everyone pays for the insurance.
Your plan would require everyone to get health insurance and would require the health insurance companies to offer the insurance. As I understand, it would not regulate the rates. How do you know the insurance that everyone must buy will be affordable?
Schwarzenegger: It will be affordable first of all because --one of our provisions is—insurance companies have to spend 85-percent of their earnings on patient care. And only 15 percent for administrative costs and profits. So therefore they cannot go and say this is really great, we are having mandatory insurance, everyone has to have it now we are going to go and double our premiums it won’t happen because 85 percent of the money goes to care and so they can’t drive up the price.
Earlier you mentioned health care in the prison system, which has been taken over temporarily by a federal judge. On balance has that been a good thing or a bad thing? Because they’re spending a lot of money.
Schwarzenegger: It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it shows the California people that a government run health care system for 172,000 prisoners doesn’t work. That a federal judge had to step in because it was a disaster. Why would we have the government run our health care system for 37-million people when they can’t even do it for 170,000 inmates. That part – it is good. It’s bad because we’re basically competing against ourselves. So the judge that is running the health care system now, he appointed someone to take care of it and they are offering twice as much money to doctors, so now doctors are leaving our prisons to go work for them. And so that is the chaos. So we are competing against ourselves. So we have to now increase the salaries in the hospitals, they increased the salaries. So we’re competing against ourselves.
And finally Governor, who do you like in the Republican race for president?
Schwarzenegger: I think we have three good candidates, and I think we have to wait and see. We have to listen to the candidates -- Romney, McCain and it’s Giuliani. I think those three have proven themselves of being good leaders. And I don’t endorse anyone at this point. I may not endorse anyone until after the convention. But I think that we have some interesting candidates there and the Democrats have some interesting candidates. But I’m very happy those three candidates understand that the environment is important, that you’ve got to be in California in the center and that they have to pay us more money when they become President. That California has to get more money that 76-79 cents on the dollar doesn’t work. That’s a commitment they have to make—any one of those guys—if they want to win here and they want to get my endorsement.
If you do endorse someone, does it have to be a Republican?
Schwarzenegger: Well, yes as I said I’m very happy with who we have in the Republican party. It’s now just a question of listening to some of their ideas and especially those ideas that are very important for California. If it is how much money we get, if it is environmental issues, if it is getting more independent of fossil fuel, if it is infrastructure, health care, immigration, those are very important issues to California people and we want to hear the answers.
Governor Schwarzenegger, thank you so much for joining us.
