Leadership Quote by Jon Huntsman, Jr.

A politician’s favorite magic trick is to turn a moral crisis into a management problem, and Huntsman does it here with practiced smoothness. “Closing the gap on the uninsured” nods at compassion, but the sentence quickly pivots to the safer, donor-friendly language of “novel approach” and “harmonize medical records.” The subtext: the real sell isn’t coverage as a right, it’s coverage as a byproduct of efficiency. If you can make the system run like a well-tuned spreadsheet, the messy question of who deserves care starts to feel almost optional.

The phrase “in our own state” plants a flag in pragmatic federalism: look, we tried something that works, no ideology required. That’s a familiar move for center-right reformers in the post-Romneycare era, when expanding access had to be packaged as technocratic tinkering rather than redistribution. “I think” softens the claim just enough to sound reasonable, while “very novel” lets him imply leadership without taking ownership of any controversial mechanism.

“Harmonize” is doing heavy lifting. It’s a soothing verb for a process that can also mean standardizing, surveilling, and centralizing. Interoperable records can reduce duplication and errors, sure, but the political intent is to reframe health reform as cost extraction: “getting costs out of the system” turns patients into inefficiencies and care into waste to be trimmed. The rhetoric aims for bipartisan appeal by swapping a battle over coverage for a consensus about modernization, where the moral argument is quietly replaced by a performance metric.