This year's ANI: The Healthcare Finance Conference was the biggest ever and featured relevant keynote speakers, topical sessions, lots of peer to peer networking and exchanges of many great ideas. Over 5,000 people spent several days refreshing their professional knowledge in order to improve the performance of our industry. Thank you to everyone who participated.
All's Fair in Love and Politics
Political insiders James Carville and Mary Matalin agree that healthcare reform is coming and that the need for reform is so critical that it will be a major issue in the presidential campaign.
It's a question that puzzled many of those in attendance at Wednesday's keynote presentation by political insiders James Carville and Mary Matalin: How can two people who are such polar opposites politically be happily married to each other?
Matalin is one of the most popular conservative voices in America, and has served presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. James Carville, a Democrat, is a colorful political consultant and strategist, and has managed more political campaigns than anyone is U.S. history, most famously as chief strategist for the 1992 Clinton/Gore presidential campaign.
One might think it would be impossible for two people whose political beliefs are so distinctly different — "He watches the 'Clintonista Network,' I watch the fair and balanced FOX (News) Network," Matalin quips — to live together in harmony, let alone parent two young girls together. The two are so passionate about politics that they have separate television viewing rooms, where Matalin once heard comedian Dennis Miller, a Republican, describe her husband as "yipping away like some Satanic Chihuahua under a strobe light." "That's my man," she said with a grimace after sharing the anecdote with ANI attendees.
But as Carville says, "I'd rather be married to someone with passion than someone without passion who just agrees with what I believe."
And if there's one thing they can agree upon in regard to politics, it's this: This year's presidential campaign is unprecedented. Never before have an African-American man, a man over the age of 70, and a woman been top contenders for their parties' presidential nominations. Never before has a presidential primary continued to be fought as late as May in an election year. "We are exhilarated, as most of the nation is, by this particular cycle," Matalin says. "We've never seen this before."
"We're already blowing the hinges off of things that we thought were there," Carville says. "You have remarkable things that are happening here." Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic candidate, has had 1.5 million people contribute to his campaign; "Entire cycles have not had a million and a half contributors," Carville says.
They also agree that healthcare reform is coming — and that the need for reform is so critical that it will be a major issue in the presidential campaign.
It's not a matter of whether the healthcare system will change; it's a matter of how it will change, Carville says.
"The healthcare system today is not a lot different than it was eight years ago. I promise you the healthcare system in 2016 will look different than it does in 2008," Carville told the crowd of healthcare finance professionals at ANI.
"You had better be on the vanguard of the case. Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you know I'm right when I say change is coming, and it's gonna be big," he said. Healthcare finance professionals need to be involved in the debate, he told ANI attendees.
The two listened to Richard J. Umbdenstock, president and CEO for the American Hospital Association, speak to ANI attendees on the need to redirect and reinvent our nation's healthcare system. "That was by far the best framing up of a critical issue that I think either of us have heard on the campaign trail," Matalin said afterward. People have a better understanding of the need for healthcare reform than they did in the 1990s, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, then First Lady, initiated national discussions on this issue.
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, and Sen. Obama are currently in a holding pattern in this post-primary phase of the campaign, and must now do two things: define their opposition, and better define themselves to the American people. "We've played a half-inning of baseball so far, if that," Carville says.
"Both McCain and Obama must develop more detailed proposals of how they would address the top challenges facing the country, including voters' concerns about the cost of health care and health insurance, and the quality of care provided. As the national party conventions draw closer, more substantive information on the candidates' proposals for addressing such issues will begin to emerge. People are going to demand that," he says.
Throughout their presentation, Carville and Matalin also kept the crowd laughing with anecdotes from their marriage.
Carville recalled the time his wife was irritated with him after a joint televised appearance. Heading back home with their two daughters in tow, they stopped at a Mexican restaurant, where their then-9-year-old daughter, Emma, began to act up. Matalin told their daughter, 'Why don't you just be good?', Carville remembers. "And Emma — showing some very early Republican tendencies — says, 'I'll be good for a dollar.' And my wife says, 'Why don't you just be good for nothing, like you're daddy?'"
Their secrets for a good marriage? There are three, Carville says: "Retreat, surrender, and capitulation." Matalin's secret: "Red wine," she says.