Candidate Interview: John Hickenlooper — U.S. Senate

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  Hi, my name is John Hickenlooper. I’m running for re-election to the United States Senate from Colorado. Well, I’m a I was a laid-off geologist. So I’m one of two scientists in the entire Senate. I became a brewpub owner, so I’ve been an entrepreneur. I put everything I owned on the line to start a business. Certainly I’m some people would say I’m not running as a former mayor or a former governor. I’m running as a former bartender. I think all these experiences taught me how to bring people together. And, you know, I’m running because our fight isn’t finished. We’ve got a lot of work to do to rein in this White House and really turn our economy around. They’ve stood our economy on its head. You know, I think what we’ve done when I was governor, we turned Colorado from 40th to the number one economy in the country. For my last three years, we expanded healthcare. We fought climate change. They’re doing all the opposite things right now in Washington. In the White House is. And I want to make sure that we turn that around. Stop this incredible expansion of costs, this runaway affordability crisis. We got a couple of things that we’re really focusing on. We have a thing called the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, to bring transparency to every aspect of healthcare with real teeth. And imagine that you’re a company, you have 100,000 employees, and you give healthcare to all those employees all over the country. Let’s say you’ve got 10,000 employees in Denver. You won’t. Right now, the way it is, you sign your insurance contract and you don’t get a chance to see whether you know what hospitals are charging a lower price or a better price. If you get an MRI is cheaper in one place or another. Why do some patients get generic drugs and some of them get name, name, brand drugs? All that stuff is opaque and you know, it’s a $5.7 trillion spend in healthcare now. And the American Medical Association estimates a quarter of it is excessive billing waste, inefficiency, maybe some fraud, redundancy. You think about that. A quarter of $5.7 trillion is $1.35 trillion. And if we could even get 25% of that for government, that would get us pretty close to universal coverage. So I think that’s one big place. I also want to really get back to addressing climate change in real time and not just fixing the healthcare system, but making sure that we create a natural environment that does a better job of keeping us healthy. I think the mail-in ballots, which has really been perfected in the last five years, I think it actually started before that I would defend mail-in ballots. It’s under attack right now by a lot of, you know, MAGA Republicans. If I had it, if I had to do something. And this has been in the works for a long time. But if I was to change and get rid of something, Colorado has a line-item veto for the governor that’s almost useless. Anytime you veto, you’re vetoing huge packages of the budget, which would almost always hold whole. People that you’re trying to help would harm them. So you rarely see the governor in Colorado ever use the line-item veto, whereas it really is a useful tool in making sure the governor is a partner with the General Assembly and making sure that the, you know, the priorities of both, the General Assembly and the governor can be met. Well, obviously, the single biggest thing right now affecting cost of living is Trump’s, you know, broken agenda. I start with a war. I mean, the war. We saw a number the other day that the extra money that that Americans are spending for diesel and for gasoline since the war started is it’s come to just about $100 billion since the war started. I mean, that’s a staggering cost. Then you look at healthcare, 500,000 Coloradans are either have lost their health insurance or they’re going to be paying a lot more for it because of that. You know, MAGA’s disastrous One Big Beautiful Bill. I said diesel and gasoline already. Groceries are a function of tariffs. And you look at farmers and this is really true in Colorado. They are getting crunched because not only is gasoline and especially diesel gone up, but the war has caused a dramatic cut off to their source of fertilizer. So fertilizer’s up 50%, diesel’s up 60%. And this is during a drought when a lot of farmers aren’t even sure they should plant. So I think that’s a part of it. And then the inflation that this White House has created and again, you know, there was inflation under Biden, but that was to get the economy going. This economy was going full tilt when President Trump came into office. And now all of a sudden we’ve seen the mortgage rate pushed up over 7% over the life of a 30-year mortgage for the average-sized Colorado house, that means an extra $100,000. You’d have to pay over that the lifetime of that mortgage. So anyway, I think that we need to reverse a lot of this stuff and make sure that we fix the healthcare system. We get back some of those subsidies to keep more people on the exchange. I think we need to make sure that we. Improve some of those plans and again, get really focused. We’ve got a couple of bills on the cost of housing and how do we bring that. You know, it’s just the inflation in housing is just out of control for for everybody. Well in some cases, you know I again, I owned a bunch of restaurants and was a former geologist when I ran for mayor. And I don’t think I really understood that I could a lot of the things I did that were really good ideas, I could have made them more permanent. We did a campaign to end chronic homelessness, and we reduced chronic homelessness by 61% in the first five years. But then we had the the financial crisis of 2009, and then I ended up becoming governor and the next mayor, I hadn’t built that in place. And I think that I looked at when I was governor, we created a national model for youth apprenticeships. So like Switzerland has, where young people, it’s not about becoming a plumber or electrician. But you know what? When you’re 16, 17, 18, still in high school, you can go work one and two days a week when you’re in like 10th grade or 11th grade. Then you work 3 or 4 days when you’re junior or senior and you get paid and you can work in an insurance company, you can work in a bank, work in a hospital. You get real job experience. We didn’t we don’t. We continue not to recognize that 65%, 70%, but 65% for sure of our kids are never going to get a four-year degree. And yet we keep telling them that the best way to a good life is to go get a four-year degree. For most kids, that means they end up racking up a bunch of debt where we’re at $1.7 trillion in student debt in this country, whereas in apprenticeship program it could be a godsend. They get paid while they’re in high school. They learn what a job’s like. They can take community college courses that would actually count towards a degree if they want to work in that direction. I think we did CareerWise Colorado, it’s been successful, but we didn’t. I didn’t fight for the funding to make it expand dramatically and really make it permanent. And I regret that. I think that’s something that it’s that important. And I think if I’d created the time and elbowed my way into the debate, we could have made it something that is national level. I’m certainly trying to do it in Washington. We’ve worked really hard between the Department of Education and the Department of Labor, and they’re both kind of saying, you know, the other guys are keeping us from doing it. I think I’m hopeful that in the last few years, the President Trump could be talked into a youth apprenticeship model just because he made his name with the TV show called The Apprentice. He could get some glory from it. Well, I think that a lot of what we need to do is things like apprenticeships, where federal, the federal government can go and provide a big chunk of the money, not all of it. I think the best programs are the ones that are our partner, our partnership between the federal government, the state government and then local, county, municipal government and apprenticeships. A good example of that. I think that helping small farmers, you know, it’s a if you spend time out on the eastern plains, these are amazing people and they know their land, they know the farms. But the the economy, the giant factory farms and gigantic meat processing plants make it really hard for the, you know, the smaller farmers to survive. And I think there’s a way to set up selling almost like co-ops. But systems where we market beef or pork or vegetables to a local local purchasers through special. Streamlined systems. And there would be some tax incentives, some ways to motivate these markets carrying local goods, because we know that they’re organic. They’re grown with love and affection. They’re healthier than the mass produced food that, you know, often comes in boxes and cans, and the money goes right into our own farms. So I think that’s a classic. There are lots of places like that where you can get federal programs, provide some incentives. The state reinforces that and provide some of the machinery, and then the locals are the ones who really make it happen. Oh my gosh. Well, it feels these days, the last couple of years, like there’s nothing I do but work. I mean, I’ve always loved reading, I love film and movies. My wife and I love sitting down and seeing a film. When you get a chance, we, you know, we have a three and a half year old son, so we don’t get to see too many films anymore. Up until a year ago, I hurt my shoulder. But I was a nationally ranked doubles squash player. Squash, kind of an indoor version of tennis. I mean, there’s I’ve always loved sports. I love music, so I try to get out to Red Rocks every chance I can get. Although that’s again, it’s if I get out there 2 or 3 times a year, I consider myself lucky. The real issue here is just making sure that I get enough time to do my job, and that’s really the highest priority.