Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on the Danny Jones Show on 580 AM

September 25, 2017

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good Morning Mayor, how’s it going?

Mayor Danny Jones: I’m doing great, the Mayor of New York City is on the line with me. I don’t – I don’t know how you even picture all of that. Mayor Koch in his video, there is a video of him on Netflix, and he flies over New York City and he says ‘it’s all mine’. Do you feel like that sometimes?

Mayor:  I – you know he had a very healthy ego, Ed Koch. I think it is a city that belongs to eight and a half million people but I can’t tell you how honored I am to lead it. But I’ll tell you something in terms of how to make sense of the day to day, and you appreciate this as a mayor, I always tell people that it’s like mountain climbing, you know, they say don’t look down, you know? You just got to keep doing the work, keep focused, it can get overwhelming at times, so just stay on a vision and move forward, you know what that feels like.

Mayor Jones: Yes, Sir. You’ve taken the time, you are in a re-election campaign, but you’ve taken the time out to talk to us here in West Virginia, I assume it’s about health care?

Mayor: It is Mayor, and I know you care about this deeply as well and I just want to say this week is going to be a pivotal one for West Virginians, for New Yorkers, for people all over the country, because it’s really going to come down to will we have access to healthcare going forward. And I want to say up front, Mayor, the fact is that the current system is not working well enough for a lot of people too. I can say as a Democrat, and I think the vast majority of Democrats I know would agree, we’re not saying the Affordable Care Act was perfect, it needs work too, but Senator McCain has really, I think, spoken for the nation when he says let’s do this the right way, a bi-partisan effort with actual hearings, actual careful craftsmanship to come up with improvements so we have a healthcare system that works for everyone.

Mayor Jones: We are – we – a disproportion – we had a tough time the last ten years,  obviously, because of the – we had an overdependence on fossil fuels and a lot of those folks are out of work but we – which produced an overdependence on Medicaid so that is basically my concern. And it’s hard to tell from where this bill goes, is what will happen to that. And I don’t even know.

Mayor: You know, what I understand so far, I’ve looked at the numbers for New York City, New York State, they‘re very, very sobering. Here’s what I’ve heard about the Graham-Cassidy Bill and what it would mean for West Virginians, that it would mean a 150,000 plus people would lose coverage and that the hospitals of the state of West Virginia would lose as much as half a billion dollars in funding over the next decade. These are the kinds of things that trouble me, we certainly see a parallel reality in New York, I think for the state it is about 2.2 million who could lose coverage, and we know for our hospitals, particularly our public hospitals, a devastating impact on the bottom line. That’s where I think this bill, because it’s been rushed, those kinds of ramifications have not really been fully looked at.

Mayor Jones: There’s been no – I was a legislator once and we used to have committee hearings – there’s has been no committee hearings on this bill.

Mayor: No, and you understand, yeah, I was a legislator too in my City Council, and it would be inconceivable on a local matter not to have hearings because what happens is, and this is part of our democracy, every stakeholder gets to come forward and explain what it would mean for them and their constituents. We also learn in hearings that sometimes there’s unintended consequences and it allows us to fix something. So, this is one of the most fundamental issues for the entire nation, there’s no way you can make a decision like this without inviting in the people affected.

Mayor Jones: There are so many votes in the past when President Obama was in office to repeal the Affordable Care Act and what this tells me is that the folks that were so eager to repeal didn’t really have anything to replace.

Mayor: Well Mayor, I think that’s the cold, hard, reality and I appreciate you pointing that out, I don’t think it gets pointed out enough. For us, as mayors, we could never say, hey we want to get rid of something and not have a replacement, whatever the topic was, our constituents would laugh us out of town if we did that, and as mayors we know we have to be held accountable to people. So, I think this is probably the fatal flaw in this last, you know, year what we’ve seen is you can’t – you can’t fight something with nothing.

Mayor Jones: I am somewhat of – I consider myself kind of a friend of John McCain’s – I doubt if he’d know my name if you said it, but he came here in 2008 and I was a Republican then, and campaigned with him. And he had a small rally down in another part of our city – our county and he met me and he talked in front of a whole bunch of people with me standing there about the importance of mayors. And a mayor’s job is different than all these legislators and all these other folks, you’re nose to nose.

Mayor: Yeah, you are and you know, yesterday Mayor, I was at a street fair in Brooklyn, and I must have talked to a 100, 150 people and they can raise any issue they want and then they expect that you’re going to do something about it. There is no filter, and there shouldn’t be a filter, and we are expected to produce. And it also means we recognize if something is not working you can’t just look the other way. And I do think sometimes folks in Washington get disconnected from the day to day lives of people and that’s where you could think about passing legislation without even, you know, bothering to have hearings because if you are far away from people maybe that somehow makes sense. We would never think that way as mayors. And I want to thank you because I know you’ve been a very independent voice and I know your city and all of West Virginia has gone through real challenges with the opioid crisis, as we have in New York and the whole country, so for example on something like heath care and the future of health care, the number one issue should be what’s it mean for addressing the opioid crisis, if it can’t answer that question, they should not be passing a bill. 

Mayor Jones: Fox News reports that they have four – two solid no votes, two somewhat solid no votes – but they have two that are not committed and one of them is Senator Portman and one of the other is Senator Capito, any message for her this morning?

Mayor: Well, look, I think Senator Capito has been very, very clear about the challenge of opioids. And I think she – I know my wife met with her on mental health issues which my wife has focused on, and said she has rarely met a legislator who was more informed and more thoughtful on the question of mental health and the question of opioids. So I believe she in her heart understands what West Virginians and Americans are going through on this topic. My only point to her today would be demand those answers and if you can’t get an answer of how this is going to address the opioid crisis and actually make our efforts to fight opioid addiction stronger, if you can’t get that answer, you shouldn’t vote for it.

Mayor Jones: I know you have a big day ahead of you, I do, and I’m a mayor of a small city and you are a mayor of a big city, so I’ll let you go, but I’d be remissive if I didn’t tell you that Mayor Steve Williams from Huntington says hello.

Mayor: He’s a good man and you are too and I want to thank you. The bond between mayors is strong across every region, across every party, and every sized city, and I want to thank you for the good work you are doing. It’s my honor to be on your show.

Mayor Jones: Thank you very much Sir. Have a great day.

Mayor: Take care now.