Former Obama CMS admin. on Covid-19 response

Andy Slavitt, the former CMS administrator under President Obama, spoke with Yahoo Finance about the U.S.'s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Our next guest-- Andy Slavitt is the former CMS administrator under the Obama administration. And Andy, starting tomorrow you'll be the host of a new podcast called In the Bubble that you're doing with your son, talking about, I think, how we kind of got here and maybe how we go forward. And I know as someone who's here in New York City and has had a lot of anxiety about the coronavirus, I look forward to hearing from experts like yourself on why this isn't the end of the world, even if a lot of mistakes have been made, and there is a path forward for all of this.

ANDY SLAVITT: Well, thanks for having me on. Look, no one in their right mind would want to be where we are right now, but we have to steer ourselves out of it the best we can. I think we are all going to brace ourselves for and have to brace ourselves for what's going to be an unprecedentedly sad and scary period of time that will-- but it will be over.

The vast majority of us will come out on the other end. And that we should-- you know, the only questions are, how many people will we lose in the process, and what will we do to help people through this time? You know, I'm 53 years old. My generation has never been asked to put itself in a position to sacrifice before like my parents' and my grandparents' generation has and, you know, faced uncertainty as you do and as people did during the Great Depression and the World-- and World War II.

Americans-- we're used to having what we want, when we want it. We're used to the liberal democracy that allows us to be suspicious of government and go our own way. A lot of those times, the things we take for granted are obviously challenged right now. And I think we're doing this podcast-- in some respects, I mean, my romantic version of it is that much in the way that families can come together and sit around and listen to not just the horrible statistics you can get from turning out on a television, but what people are dealing with, how to get through it, how to keep a semblance of your life going, and how to deal with the uncertainty and the challenges.

And many of them are economic. Many of them are sociological. Many of them are health. And so, hopefully, we can have a good conversation and help people through this time.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Andy, it's Anjalee here. Thanks so much for joining. Curious on your thoughts. I know that you're daily in touch with a number of experts around the country and around the globe, as well as the White House. What have you seen changed from the start of the month, really, and now in the US response to this outbreak?

ANDY SLAVITT: Well, look, we're late. I mean, our response is late. And, you know, all of us have been late before, and we've all worked all-nighters when we've been late and we catch up. The problem in this particular situation is that we're chasing something that's growing exponentially. It's kind of like swimming after a speedboat that is moving from the dock at 15 feet away when you start swimming. By the time you get to where the boat was, it's 100 feet away. And so time really costs you.

I do believe that we still have states, we still have parts of the country that are well behind where their response should be. But on the other hand, we have some evidence of what works as well. So the state of Washington has reduced its infection rate, what people would refer to it as r, from over 2 to 2.5 down to 1.4. Wuhan is at 1.25. The flu is at 1.3. And that's phenomenal.

We can look back at the 1918 flu, and we can look at about 20 cities National Geographic studied on exactly what social distancing measures they took, when. And there are amazing patterns if you look at the death rates per 100,000. Those that took early action and sustained action in social distancing had literally half the death rate per population as those that came late to the party or who did take social distancing actions, but have relaxed them too early. They declared victory when they saw the case count go down.

I think among the most important things to happen, as I'm sure many of you see-- have seen this paper that came out yesterday from AEI, primary authored by Scott Gottlieb, Mark McClellan, and some others, which, I think, for the first time articulates a how-do-we-get-out-of-it path with clarity, accuracy, and some precision. Those-- the facts will change on the ground.

But if you haven't read it, it's an easy read, and it is a, I think, a hopeful message that based upon the triggers that have to come in front of us, we can-- what we can do here. I think it's a lot about giving our scientists time to catch up with us, because the only way to get a hold of an exponential growth curve is with kind of Moore's law type productivity and thinking, and to give our frontline care providers a chance to deal with the onslaught that's coming.

And the only way we can do that is with significant social distancing measures and what we lodged weeks back, this #StayHome campaign.

RICK NEWMAN: Andy, this is Rick Newman. So this-- governments at all levels are obviously responding to the state, local, and federal. What is the role of the federal government here? What should it be doing? And what should it be leaving to states and cities? And how good a job is the federal government doing at this point?

ANDY SLAVITT: So, look, I have-- people might know that I'm a Democrat. But for now, I'm not. I'm an American. I'm not even just American. I'm a member of our species, as I think all of us should be. So I don't want to spend a ton of time criticizing where we've been. We have to navigate from where we are, not where we wish we were. I think-- I would like to see-- there was one press conference where President Trump said, "I'm a wartime president," and I'd really like to see him inhabit that.

I think being a wartime president means arming your troops. It means reading the battle maps. It means being incredibly skeptical when people present you good news. It means moving resources very quickly. It means good decision making. It means not happy talking folks. It means being driven by data. And I think the role of the federal government is to make very bold, quick standards that can get people moving.

For example, the federal government should say, we will backstop the order of 500,000 ventilators at a set price. We will backstop the order of 2 billion N95 masks. Now they'll never have to make those purchases or be able to get the money into the system to do that, but factories have-- people are pausing, and people are hesitating.

We have coordination problems where one state may have a shortage of testing reagents, and another state may have tons of testing reagents but have no swabs to extract the test. And so we're not optimizing. The federal government could do this, but they need to have a military operations approach, not the kind of approach they're having now. With everything I've seen, they get to the right answers, but they get there a week later.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah. Andy, we're going to have to leave it there. Really appreciate you taking the time to call in today. We appreciate all your contributions on Twitter to this, and we look forward to the podcast. Hopefully we can talk to you again. Thank you for joining us.

ANDY SLAVITT: Yes.