It was a nice brisk walk at 6 AM for six blocks from the Hilton to News Corp headquarters on the Avenue of the Americas. The makeup artist did the best she could do with what she had to work with. I walked onto the set knowing I would have less than five minutes to answer questions from Maria Bartiromo and her three guest journalists. If you split the time evenly among the five of us, there would be less than a minute for each.

Healthcare is approaching 20% of the economy and the list of issues, problems, and solutions is quite long. What would they ask? I was mostly pleased with how it went. At one point one of the journalists got into some political statements. I do my best to avoid politics when it comes to healthcare. I do blame Congress for many of the problems, but I don’t associate the blame with either party — they are all guilty of favoring special interest groups rather than helping us reduce the cost of healthcare.

The last question asked on the show was whether Obamacare is working. I find journalists want a yes/no answer, but I steadfastly maintain it is not that simple. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA aka Obamacare) has ten parts to it. We hear a lot about the insurance part which clearly is not working as well as it could. Some of the other parts are actually beginning to work. The best examples of what is working are the introduction of the accountable care organization (ACO) and the increased focus on quality and patient safety. I will write separate posts on each of these critical areas. A slightly edited version of the video clip without the advertising is here. Read about Obamacare in Health Attitude.