Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer appeared on Fox News’ “Your World With Neil Cavuto” following President Barack Obama’s Montana Town Hall Friday.
Schweitzer stressed that Americans pay twice as much for health care than citizens of other industrialized nations. He then pointed out that he, as governor of Montana, knows a thing or two about pinching pennies and claims that, if given the opportunity, Montanans could hammer out a health care reform plan in 10 days. A partial transcript:
CAVUTO: … I told you this when you were here before — you do know about doing that. I don’t know if they know about that in Washington.
So, if you were to tell me I could extract some savings in Montana health care-related costs, given your track record, I would believe you. I really would. Given Washington’s track record, I would not.
SCHWEITZER: Well, Washington, D.C., is a big place, and it’s a long ways away from Montana.
But there are some lessons that we can learn in some states like Montana in cost containment. For example, in Montana, we use evidence- based medicine. If you are in the Montana pool of insured people working for the state of Montana — and, for example, in pharmaceuticals…
CAVUTO: Right.
SCHWEITZER: … we use evidence based medicine to decide which medicine you take. You don’t get to take the most expensive one. You get to take the one that does the most for the least.
CAVUTO: OK.
But let me ask you this. And I know you’re a straight shooter, so I hope you will give me a straight answer. Do you really think that we can pay for this with savings that the — the president wants to see, even though the CBO doesn’t see them, and the only people who will have to pay more will be the rich seeing their deductions limited, and that is all; we are there, done, fini; away we go?
SCHWEITZER: If we have 16 percent of the people that are uninsured, and those uninsured people are getting health care, but it’s the most expensive in the system, and we’re already paying for it by shifting that cost to the other people, it is like shooting fish in the barrel for me to find 20 percent savings, so that we can bring those people into the insurance system.
If you — if you handed all the paperwork to us out here in Montana, we could get it done in about 10 days.
<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,540030,00.html" title="Read the whole transcript here.“>Read the whole transcript here.