Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20140304

From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. This is a historic day for a reason. It has been a long time coming. Today, americans who have been forced to go without insurance now visit healthcare. Gov. Steven brill is here, the author of this weeks cover story in Time Magazine. It is called code red inside the nightmare launch of health care. Gov and the team that figured out how to fix it. It takes a closer look at the administrations healthcare website and it tells the story of the Technology Experts brought into rescue the site. That Team Included Silicon Valley consultants, google engineers, and the whiz kids behind obamas reelection campaign. They turned around healthcare. Gov, in the process saving the president s legacy. Let me begin with this question. How did you come to this story . You had already written a cover story about health care. People are still trying to make their way through it. I thought it was pretty clear. Then comes the story. Tell me what brought you to this story and what were you in pursuit of. What i decided to do over the summer listen, the government is about to launch the most complicated, ambitious, new Program Since medicare or social security. What about an inside story of how they are doing it . Before launch. I started in july and august. The first round of interviews i did with people at the department of health and human services, cms, the Medicare Agency supposed to be in charge of the website, and with people at the white house. As a conversation starter, who is in charge of this . I really did not listen very carefully to the answers. I got back on the train to go back to new york and im reading my notes and i got 12 different answers. I got home that night and i said to my wife, this thing is in big trouble. If you had asked the president , would he have known who was in charge . If you asked sebelius they said they were in charge. And there was really nobody in charge. I kept on the story. On october 1, i realized i had a very different story. By the first week in october, every media outlet was writing stories about how the launch failed. And then i decided, im going to do a story about how or if they are able to fix it. That is what the story is. In those first two weeks, the president on october 17, and directed his top people to bring in experts and decide, should we scrap it . The question was raised, do we start over . The thing was failing so miserably, the first thing, is there anyway we can save this thing . Define how bad it was. There is a scene where the chief of staff leaves the white house and goes to baltimore. The center for medicare and medicaid services. He tries to pry out of the staff what is going on. He only thing he is able to figure out is they say that maybe three out of every 10 people can even get onto the site. Once they get on, there are all these bugs kicking them off. The first day, they enrolled eight people. He tells the president , this looks pretty bad. The president says, we have to decide whether we will scrap it or not. Other than that, they had no information. They did not even have something called the dashboard, the set of controls you have if you are running a website. How much traffic, which pages failing. They could not give them any of that information. They say, we need help. Where do they go . A lot of different places, but the same community, but one of the places they start is with the alums of the Obama Campaign. The whiz kids who reengineered election day politics by sifting data and targeting voters and figuring out what they were doing, they completely overwhelmed the republicans. There were a group of people who had formed a company in chicago who worked in the Obama Campaign in which the lead and only investor is eric schmidt. The white house reaches out to them. Ironically, the white house reached out to them during the summer, but to do something very different. To use the data to target and market people to get them to enroll. The principal tension, the principal fear was when they launched on october 1, would anybody come to the website question mark no one was talking about, if they came, what will happen . They have to go to the other side of the house and find that technologists who built the data systems. They parachuted into washington. They thought it would stay for two or three days. In most cases, they stayed until december. Worked through thanksgiving day. The first reaction was, this stuff has so many obvious mistakes, so much low hanging fruit they can fix quickly that they think they can fix it. This kind of software was not talking to that kind of software. The people who were doing it or the people who worked at google, twitter, ebay, who had run into problems as those companies had grown. Who should have been fired . The person responsible is the president of the united states. I think you have to ask yourself, what the chief of staff was doing other than having people tell him everything is ok. He seems like a very good guy and has a good reputation for competence. The simple fact is if something is so important, why wouldnt he take the president s advice . Every planning meeting he had before the launch, he would say to the white house staff, this is all great. None of it matters if the technology does not work. That is as far as he went. None of the people in those meetings had any idea whether the technology worked. Was there somebody lots of people who said we have a huge problem. We have a system that will not be able to do what it promises. On the other hand, you have the white house chief of staff say, will we turn it on tomorrow, we will knock your socks off. That is the level of how aloof he was from the problem. It was also kind of obvious to anyone who was experiencing this. One of the other experts who saved the twitter website, he said, the first mistake was so obvious. You never shift a Consumer Product like this. You never do it all at once. You rolled it out in a city and you expand to a state and as you are rolling in out, you see the stuff that does not work and you fix it. You do not roll it out to the country in one day. Why did they do it . They did it because the president had established an october 1 launch date. They could have easily it was an option the president had started on. When they came in to fix it, what was the response . Was everybody saying, thank god you are here the engineers who worked for the usual suspect contractors were glad to have them around. There was no one in the government who was directing and in charge of the contractors. They were happy to have these guys. Once you get the suits at of the way and you get these guys in the room, they want to fix things. They all cared about this, too. A lot of them, their families have had health care issues. This is not an abstract thing. Where is it today . It works. The part that doesnt work is a backend that pays the Insurance Companies if you sign up. That just means the Insurance Companies and the government have to do more paperwork by hand. They have taken care of the access to healthcare. Gov. Yes, they have. What have they found out about who was willing to try to access it and whether they will get enough young people to support it . The demographics, i do not think it will be a longterm problem. They will get those people. In the first two years, that really does not matter. The press has made more of the drama of that than there needs to be. Even if they do, the subsidies that you and i and the taxpayers pay for people to get insurance, they will just go up. I do not think that will be a problem. The demographics for work ok. You think everything is fine now . I do not think everything is fine. What is not fine is the challenge i wrote about in the first article. Many more people in this country are going to have health insurance, but the subsidies the taxpayers will have to pay for them or the medicaid expenses, the taxpayers will have to pay, are going to be much more expensive than people think. If the american public, if it was politically feasible, would we have been better off with some other system . We talked about this last time. The evidence is since every other country in the developed world has that kind of other system variations. Since the citizens of those countries are satisfied with the systems, since the cost per capita are half to what we pay and since the results, the health care outcomes, are typically as good or better than the results of our health care system, we would have been, but we cant. You have to go back before world war ii to do that. You cannot unravel all of that. Does medicare work . Medicare works well and the people who run it run it very well. The president can look to himself and say, i took advantage of what i thought was the moment. I wanted accessibility. I wanted to make sure it was not a net contributor to the overall debt. I wanted to look at both access and containment and i did it because he worried if he did not do it then, it would be no chance to do it. That has a lot to do with the book i am writing about. What i dont think he is able to do, the Political Climate of getting even this bill passed was so tough, was to do much about containing cost. The good news is many of the thousands of people who wrote to me after the first article with Horror Stories about think forced into bankruptcy or leaving their loved ones, a lot of that has been fixed. In terms of trying to make different ends meet, did they choose the right program . Did they put together what was necessary for political consensus . They did not get any republican votes. They could have done some things differently. They could have been tougher on costs, but they will tell you have if you step back and think about it, the hospital lobby did not oppose the bill. The pharmaceutical lobby did not oppose the bill. The medical device lobby did not oppose the bill. If you are going to pass a law that Reforms Health care, all of the major profit makers in health care actually like, the notion that it will do something with cost curve is ridiculous. Speaker boehner and some republicans, we do not even want to put immigration on the table because we want to go to the electorate in 2014 with one issue. Health care. Tell me what you know about again, you will have a lot more people with coverage. A lot more people with medicaid coverage. The cost is going to be higher than anybody has estimated. For example, if you go to kentucky, kentucky had its own state exchange, which worked well from the first day. They have enrolled a lot of people. Theyve expanded medicaid and have tens of thousands of people. If Mitch Mcconnell runs only against obamacare in november, i am not sure how well that will work. I have talked to people who are republicans all over the state and they love this program. The obama people are betting on the fact that by election day, it will work a lot better. There will be a better word of mouth about it. They could have improved the odds on that bet if they figured it out how to do it on october 1 instead of december 1. This investigation, did you come to conclusions about the way this administration manages programs and manages hard choices that might Say Something about how they do other things . I like to do my journalism by focusing on what i know and what i report. What i know is the way they manage this program was almost as if they thought actual governing, the nuts and bolts of governing, is for peons. They are policy people. They thought they could create policy and it would simply work because somebody else would make it work. The hard things in life, sometimes other things that involve making it work, not just having great thoughts. Great to have you here. Steven brill, the cover story of Time Magazine on what happened with healthcare. Gov and how they fixed it. The jury may still be out as to how it works overall. The administration found some people to make it better. Back in a moment, stay with us. I have two renaissance paintings. Both come from christies. One is the picture that is early 16th century and the other is school of fontainebleau. That is where i bought the painting that contributed to the school of fontainebleau. We do not know exactly who the artist is. David zwirner is a dealer and gallerist. He represents Living Artists and their estates. The new yorker described the gallery he opened in 2013 as a temple to minimalism and architectural pitch to living minimalist as well. It comes from a long profile in the new yorker under the headline dealers hand, why so many people are saying paying so much money for art. Ask david zwirner. Welcome. Why are so many people paying so much for art . It is one of the most wonderful pursuits, collecting art. People are doing it for centuries. It has been very much a growing business. Prices are a function of supply and demand. More people want a work of art. There are a lot of rich people around. Are they investing from Silicon Valley . Traditionally, it is entrepreneurs who are collectors. They start to own companies and eventually find the time and passion to educate themselves about art. You come to this from your father. My dad had a gallery, but it is not the gallery i have. He had a gallery in germany. I mean the love of art. I grew up in a household that was filled with art. I had a small advantage. A lot of great art i saw as a kid and i was quite fortunate. Is there a philosophy behind the work that you do . Is there a guiding philosophy about being an art dealer . You have to understand the difference between an art dealer and a gallerist. The art dealer is responsible for finding choice material. He bypasses the artist to some extent. You only sell those people that he manages. Correct. The art dealer has a much broader field. He can be interested in all kinds of art and usually has all kinds of interest. The artists i called out, what do they have in common . Other than you . They are singular voices. I do not have stylistic similarities. You mentioned donald judd. He is one of the great minimalists. What we are looking for are who are authentic in their vision and singular in the way they go about making art. You have described minimalism as the last really great newness. That is true and not really true. The great newness in the 20th century is modernism itself. It is the most extreme form of the new of trying to change the world, maybe even some utopian ideas. Postmodernism accepts the world as it is and does not bring something radical into the world. You became attracted to minimalism . Anyone in my field is attracted to minimalism. The intelligent rigor of bringing a work to its logical consequence, taking everything out that is unnecessary and trying to find a perfect ideal form is very appealing. Minimalists were the first that incorporated architecture. It is not just a work of art, it is a work of art in a piece of architecture. That dialogue is very interesting to me. This is what you also said in the new yorker magazine. There were true giants, true modernists, i found it strange that they were selling for a fraction of liechtenstein. I cannot imagine a Museum Director saying, i do not need it. Any Museum Director would agree that they are part of the canon. It is very much the role in the job of the museums of this world to tell the history of art and you cannot do it at this stage without bringing minimalism into the equation. The price thing is something quite different. Pop art and minimalism originated around the same time. They are both radical movements and they both change the way we looked at art. One is valued much, much higher than the other. Minimalism is undervalued . It belongs at the same level. Exactly. It is a breakthrough in the visual arts. It is a breakthrough in the visual arts. Do you like everything that you show . No. I should. That is impossible to like everything. Do you tell the artists . That is a difficult thing to do, but it is our job to edit. I have done it. I have done things like going into studios i have seen a body of work and i mightve suggested to postpone the show or wait a little bit. That is editing, of course. One has to be very cautious. You see something radically new that you do not understand. Not understanding might bring you into a negative reaction, and it really is a breakthrough body of work. I have learned to tread lightly. The audience passes judgment. How was your own taste or your own appreciation changed over the years . I am more and more in awe of what it takes to be an artist. The pressures and rigor of going into the studio and confronting nothing and making something, it is extraordinary. It is like a writer looking at a blank page. I cut the artist more slack. Was there ever a moment in your life where you wanted to paint . Absolutely not. It is treacherous if you think you could do what they do. Your judgment is flawed because you think, he should be using green when he is using red. I have no talent in painting. I cannot even take a good photograph. I interview artists, musicians, actors, politicians, business executives, scientists, novelists, poets. Everyone i know is a student of the art that is within their arena. They read things, looking almost clinically at others work, asking themselves how did they do this and how was this new . There is a constant inquiry about what everybody is doing. Not to copy, but to understand. You are saying that artists are very astute critics as well. Do you believe what i just said . I love going to museums with an artist. They have a certain type of looking, a certain way of looking at art. I can learn a lot from them. How do they look at art differently from the way you look at art . I am looking at it through my education. How that particular work falls into a period. They are looking at a much more in a singular way. How did this guy come up with this . You can go with a contemporary artist into an exhibition of old masters and you look at it is if it was made yesterday. I wanted to take an artist i think it would be impossible to do this. From the moment the idea of painting a painting came into their head. What went on between that time and the last stroke they took . What is the process . We have artists who have an almost daily studio practice. They will come into the studio and they will start working and it will be changing the canvas, come back the next day. And then we have other artist who spent months and months thinking about the imagery and will create these paintings within hours or days. It is quite fascinating. One is a physical approach, working through the canvas. The other one is more of a conceptual approach. They wait until they know exactly i saw you flash a photograph earlier. He is the kind of artist who will be talking to me about an idea, a group of paintings, and they will be completely finished in his mind. Sometimes he shows me photographs. And then he will execute them in the studio. It is mindboggling. How do you approach the life of a gallerist . How are you different from others . I have a very Distinct Group of artists i work with. The comparisons should not so much be about rankings, who are the artists this guy works with . Is it coherent . Are these artists strong . We are at 45 artists and the estates that we represent and that is what the gallery is about. What did your father teach you . Do not haggle when you want to buy a great work of art. If you want it, go for it . Exactly. Have you followed that . I have made some grave mistakes where i did not and i have learned my lesson. If you love it, just go get it. A year from now, you will forget what you paid for it. Now you are upset about the price, but a year from now, it you are walking through your home and you can remember. Serious collectors are that way. When they walked away collection, they do not see dollar signs. When you say serious collector, the quality of their collection or the quality of how they approach their collection . There are lots of different ways to go about putting the collection together. You can if you are a novice and you want to try, you can bring talented people to guide you through the process. If you want to do it yourself, you have to educate yourself. I think those that really engage and really pursue their interest find great collections. Lets take a look at some of these. This is secretary of state in 2005. This is a painting that he painted in 2005 and that was the year after the Bush Administration got voted in again. He was interested in that from a european point of view. That is condoleezza rice. For a lot of european, the second term of the administration was strange. People could not believe this president would be reelected given his track record. He wanted to create a bunch of images to capture the mood. This is an iconic painting. Condoleezza rice is a great visual metaphor. If you would see the painting in the flesh, you would notice that even though it is a small painting, her head is gigantic. It is quite menacing. The painting is disturbing. The painting ended up in the museum of modern art. The next one is from 2013. That was unusual to have two big exhibitions in new york at the same time. Ours was the show of brandnew work. We premiered a new body of work. I always admired jeffs work, but i did not think i would be working with him. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit new york and it hit the chelsea art district especially bad. A lot of people do not know that. A lot of galleries were underwater. While we were cleaning up, and it was really devastating. I got a call from the studio to arrange a meeting. Why would i get a call in the middle of this . I said, i do not think we have time right now. We are in a terrible way. He really wants you to come over to the studio. I went over all of the people that work with him are around. He asked me whether i would be interested in showing a new body of work. He brought me photographs of the series. We premiered that work last may. Was he showing at the same time somewhere else . He has had a long relationship with another gallery in new york. Why did he call you . He wanted a fresh vehicle for this type of work. This work is a synthesis of the work he has done a last 30 years. He wanted to be in a place where there was no history. It worked really well. What is his greatness . I think he is a catalyst of our culture. Once you engage in his work, you know where we are. Jeff koons is a postmodernist. What is exciting about his work, and disturbing for others, is that he accepts the world as it is. Acceptance and affirmation are strategies that he employs. He is the most accessible artist i can imagine. Has he been on the show . More than once. He has no sense of i am an artist. Theres a sense of lets have a conversation about whatever you want to talk about. He is his art. There is no daylight between his private life and his life as an artist. What i love about him, he stands behind the work. If you invite him to speak about it, he will defend it. It is the persona and the way he frames the work is part of the work. Is this a good time in new york . Forget prices, but the creation and the body of work that is out across minimalism and across the spectrum . Is this a fertile period . Can you even say that . It is very difficult to say when you are in it. It feels as if artists have tremendous opportunities right now and there is great freedom to produce. In a strange way, the relatively radical influx of money into the art world makes it harder for careers to develop. Things are sped up. That might be difficult for a younger generation. They get famous and rich before they flesh out where the talent is . It takes a while to find your voice as an artist. You would have a few false starts. You might have to make a terrible show in order to get to a good show. Right now, especially for the younger generation, that is not easy. The market passes judgment. It makes it much harder. Tell me about this. She is a great phenomena. She is now in her 80s and in her sixth decade of making art. She started in new york. She came to new york in her 20s and lived with donald judd. There is word that there was a little bit of a romantic liaison between them. She planted her flag both in minimalism and in pop art. She did happenings, performances, and was influential in new york as a pop artist. She kept going in both directions. She makes very popular work. This particular piece is an infinity room that she presented in new york. The most popular show ever. People lined up around the block to see this work. That is from 2013. Next is donald judd. This is from 1991. Anabel helped us put this building together. We opened with a flavin and a judd show. They are the father figures of minimalism. Here is the 1974 flavin. That is a show we did a couple of years ago. It is a work of neon light that bisects a room. It is a kind of thing that you want to see. The minimalists were the first to create the id of an installation. Doug wheeler, this is a current exhibition. This is a brandnew work. He was considered a minimalist, but he is really one of the people that comes out of los angeles and started the light and space movement. This is a rotational horizon, that is what he called it. I wish you could see that. This one, you really have to experience. It is a very large room and you would not know where this room ends. It is almost surreal. It is quite fascinating. People call it existential. If someone came to you, i want you to find me something you did not show as an artist and you did not manage, would you put them in touch with a dealer . Or would you go in search of what this that is the other side of what we do. We are both art dealers and gallerists. As an art dealer, you try to build collections. You understand what the collector is asking, how he wants to shape his collection. You try to help him fill the gaps. I would take that very seriously. I would try to find a work of art that makes sense. If it is out of my realm of expertise, i would let him know quickly. What is the going commission . It is set by what the auction houses charge. It is a sliding scale of how expensive they work is. It is mostly 20 . What is the greatest deal you ever pulled off . Not as a dealer, but generally. Suppose i came to you and said, ok, as of this moment, i want to write a first paragraph about what you had done, what should be in that first paragraph . Difficult question. A few years ago, i was able to buy a group of artwork was in a museum for 40 years. We were able to pull that off, by the group of work. We did a big show. We placed most of the work in other collections. That was a significant deal that i am quite proud of. People love competition between the new york yankees and the boston red sox, between google and facebook and apple. They also love competition between gallerists. And . How do you see that competition . Competition is a great thing for any business. It generally makes you better. Larry has a fantastic gallery. How is he different from you . He has a different stable of artists, a Different Team of people who work with him. They has a certain atmosphere. I have been working hard to create an atmosphere how do those atmospheres differ . I think we are artistcentric. I started as a gallerist, i traveled around to get myself a group of artists together. I became an art dealer later. In order to be able to finance some of my escapades, some of the artists i brought in early on were not easy to sell. I wanted to subsidize what i was doing with the sales of work we sell in the secondary market. Larry started as an art dealer and found his passion as a gallerist. When you lost him, something changed in you. That is what the profile said. He is one of my alltime favorite artists. What changed was because i was heartbroken. That was an artist that we worked with from the early and i and the late 1990s really busted my chops to bring him to an International Audience and then he jumped ship. That was tough. I learned a valuable lesson. The lesson was . I had to grow my business to be competitive at different levels. A switch was thrown at that time. It would be wrong to say the motivation is to do something that is against the gallery. It was coincidental that the shows overlapped. In richards case, we did a beautiful show of early material. Richard has sat at this table. He is one of the alltime great artists. I was always fascinated about those first four years, five years, where he developed his language. It is a very distinct moment. You can really trace a direct lineage to what he is doing today. We approached him to get his blessing. He took over. We do not represent richard. Finally, i love the fact that growing up in your dining room, there were these 40 or so warhol brillo boxes. They were my favorite hiding spaces, right. Where is all of this going . The art market has had ups and downs, but do you see it on an upsurge now for a while . Does it totally tie itself to the economy . It totally is tied to the economy. At the high price level at which we are now. At the price of young galleries with new artists, it is not. We have price escalation in the 20 years since ive been in business, it has been incredible to see how resilient the art market has been. It was in a serious slump when i started, 91, 92. It was almost catastrophic. It has been rising ever since. We are in a fascinating moment, a golden age of the art market. It has gotten much broader and bigger. It used to be european and american pursuit. Now it is a global pursuit. China is just starting. The middle east is strong. It is real. You came to new york thinking you might be a musician. Yes. I failed at that endeavor. I had a lot of fun. I went to nyu and i studied jazz and i played with some great people. I did not think i could cut it. I married a wonderful woman and realized i wanted to start a family. My heart goes out to the jazz musicians of this world. It is a hard life. I did not have that stamina so i changed course. I am glad you did. Thank you for coming. This is the new yorker from december 2, 2013. It is called dealers hand and it is a profile. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. Live from pier three, welcome to bloomberg west where we cover the future of business. Coming up, put a pin on this. My interview with ben silbermann. Find what he wants to say. Googles private terminal is a step closer to taking off