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Based in Denver, Colo., the health provider delivers dialysis treatment and other medical services to patients across the U.S. Through its subsidiary Vively Hea

DaVita | 2023 World's Most Admired Companies

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DaVita

DaVita | 2023 World's Most Admired Companies | Fortune

Rey Mashayekhi

California voters reject ballot initiative on dialysis clinic requirements

/2020/11/04/california-prop-proposition-23-results-kidney-dialysis-clinic-requirements-ballot-initiative/

Sy Mukherjee

What Tuesday’s Midterm Election Results Mean for Health Care

/2018/11/07/midterm-elections-healthcare-medicaid/

UnitedHealth Is Buying a Major Doctor Group on the Heels of the CVS-Aetna Deal

/2017/12/06/unitedhealth-davita-cvs-aetna/

Katherine Gehl, Founder, Institute for Political Innovation
Kent Thiry, Former Chair and CEO, DaVita
In conversation with: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

CEO Initiative 2022 - Finding A Fix For Our Broken Politics

Conferences

that was a pretty simple, straightforward message. Look, we spent a lot of time this morning talking about climate change. It's a highly complex problem uh in a perfect world. Maybe it would be better handled by functioning government, but we don't live in a perfect world as we just heard. And so businesses stepped into the fray. And it was really interesting to hear the three Ceos who were up here talk about the really measurable progress that they're uh making on this topic. Now, we're gonna turn we have turned to another problem that's equally complex our broken political system, uh fixing a dysfunctional political system that that empowers the extremes on both sides and disenfranchises uh most of the people who are in the center, a number of business leaders have said to me over the last couple of years, hey, you know, we're gonna work on climate. We don't want to have anything to do with politics. Keep me as far away from that mess as you can. And I understand that completely. But I guess the question for this next group is is that really a sustainable position? Can you really hold that position? I mean, a broken political system is probably as existential a problem for for business in the future, as a broken climate is uh and it's certainly no more complex to address uh than a broken climate. So, how do you fix it? I asked Senator Mansion that question. I don't think we, you know, more earmarks, I'm not sure would be the perfect answer, but that that was his answer, but we've got two people now joining us on stage who have been thinking about it, not just thinking about it, working on it and actually making some progress on it. So I really am excited about welcoming Catherine Bell and Kent theory to the stage. Please please join me. Thank you. So I don't think the senator solved the problem for us. I think earmarks is like saying that a black market is a substitute for a free market economy. Yeah, it didn't seem to be the perfect answer, but but you all have have both focused on this quite a lot, spent a lot of time on it. Catherine, you published an article in fortune, what was that? five years ago? Yeah. With my, with Michael Porter sort of analyzing the dysfunction of the system and comparing it to the problems of a duopoly. Over time, you've really focused on top five voting as maybe not the answer, but the most important answer. Why are you doing that? Well, first of all, thank you for publishing the first work on this in Fortune magazine. I think of it as the birthplace, uh, why I'm focused on final five voting. It really begins simply with what problem do we want to solve for? So there's a zillion problems in politics, Here's what I care about the ability of congress and state governments to solve problems in a sustainable way in the broad public interest, which is um, to say can they do what would need to be done to deal with the complex trade offs in our issues? Can they reach across the aisle, innovate, negotiate, make a deal and then vote yes on consensus legislation And those are all the things that nobody does today. So what I care about is enabling people to do their jobs, well, essentially think of it this way, one thing we wouldn't do as C. E. O. S. And that's what I was before I went into this political work is higher the best people we can and then say to them on day one, oh by the way, if you do your jobs really well in two years we're going to have to fire you. And that is what our existing election system says to all of our Congress people. And that is why we don't get the results and that's what we want to change. And so why does finally fix that final five changes it because right now, Because it makes all November votes matter. So we're all fond of saying elections matter our collective problems actually, that most elections don't matter at all on September 13 of this year. And this is according to research from United America, which can't co chairs 85% of seats in the US House were done over. We knew who they were because those were people who won Safe Republican seats in red districts or safe blue seats in blue, destroy All those winners were chosen and in the Senate, it's over 60% of winners who were chosen by the end of the primary. And the problem with that is not so much who got elected, but that it means that people who were elected in those primaries are working for the people who voted in the primary. And only 8% of the of eligible voters in this entire country participated in the blue and red primaries that picked 85% of our winners, only 8% of people. And this 8% of people on both sides is characterized you think they're totally different. They're the same and the wildly most wildly consequential way possible. They are characterized by negative partisanship. They hate the other party more than they even like their own their own party sides. And so because our representatives only work for this side or this side, they can't afford to engage with the other side because their bosses don't allow. And and Final Five forces them to can't you come at this also as the ceo uh you've you've you've had some significant successes. Uh tell us about what you think the path forward is. Well, first of all, I agree with Catherine. That Final Five is I think perhaps the nuclear weapon in the arsenal that literally if we could snap our fingers and have that system exists throughout America our democracy and the performance of our country would improve literally overnight. That's not available. But that snapping the finger and having it happen. So there's a number of other arrows in our quiver that are incredibly important things like open primaries 50 years ago just about everybody was an R. A. D. And so there were moderates in the D. And there are moderates in the R. Uh then what happened is more and more people were getting unhappy and left. Both parties which then skewed the parties even further to the left and the right. And so now in many states there are more independence than their R. D. S. R. R. S. And they're disenfranchised if they can't vote fully in a primary. The second is a cumulative effect of gerrymandering. A cancer on the body politic where now that 85% of safe seats, part of that is natural, organic self sorting. But more than half of it has to do with political manipulation in a way where we the citizens can fight back. And so in many states, about half the states in America there's ballot initiative processes, for example, we've successfully passed open primaries in some places. We've successfully done during batting reform in some places and we've succeeded in putting final five in some places. And so there are clear signs of progress but it only happens when people make it happen. Yeah, so this is an uphill battle. Why is if if it if you make it you make the argument so clear and simple that this is what we need to bring some sanity to our political process, what keeps it from happening. So let's talk about what needs to happen to get the sanity because it's far more in reach than we would assume. Five states with final five voting by 2025 would give us 10 senators freed from the tyranny of the party primary and some number of representatives depending on the state. Those 10 senators, still Democrats, still Republicans, still the same people elected on the existing system. But now answering to a majority of November voters instead of just this side and this side can form really the bench off of whom can come off of which can come the gang of six, the gang of eight, the gang of four to figure out that consensus way forward and buck the partisan stranglehold on stranglehold on governing because that's what their incentive to do. We don't need it in 50 states. And guess what? Five states by 2025 that's we have one state. We hopefully will get another one with Nevada on november eight. It's $100 million endeavor. We spent a billion dollars approximately on two Georgia Senate races last cycle. This is the best r. O I of any philanthropic or political investment out there today. Well, absolutely. This is a winnable fight and let me maybe for one second go off in the area, but what business can do, uh because there's a number of things we can do. And it's not at all clear that if business, if business does not engage, it's not at all clear that we're on the path to victory. I think we often underestimate our convening ability and our capabilities that can bring immeasurable value to some of these initiatives and political processes. Uh for example, in colorado where I'm from, we convene business convened all the days and the hours to work on legitimate non partisan gerrymandering reform. Uh we have the ability to bring people together and look at them and say, you know, we're here representing the middle of America that's been disenfranchised. And we want to see whether you care about more about your party or the country in this room as we start discussing this kind of reform. And then magic starts to happen over 12 weeks. Hundreds of hours of negotiating. There are times you would go into that room and you couldn't tell who was a D and who wasn't are at that point. And then the coalition was so impressive. With these are eyes business nonprofits that both parts of the state legislature passed the gerrymander reform unanimously never before happened in the history of America and would not have happened had the business community not taken the stand of saying, forget specific policy debates on immigration or tax or health care, we're about democracy, about a functional democracy and then in running these kind of campaigns we take for advantage. We forget how good we are facilitating we forget how good we are doing strategy and creating an operating plan and having a management process and having discipline and messaging discipline. We all do that every single day. You don't know how different that is until you step into one of these campaigns and see how lacking many of those skills are that we take for granted because we've been doing them in a competitive environment for 2030 years. So it's it's a situation where if business gets engaged, the probability that we preserve America's democracy in a fresh way, literally. But look here, here's the reason business leaders don't want to get engaged and they say it over and over again, is that an individual races? It looks like they're taking a partisan position and the extremes on the, on the republican side or advocate, you know, election deniers advocating issues on, on uh, social and human rights that many come can't live with. And on the right side, you have a group of people at the extremes who don't really believe in capitalism. Um, and so, you know, no sane businessperson wants to align themselves with one party or the other. So how do you advance this without looking in individual cases like you're taking sides? Well, so in this case, final five voting is uniquely, uh, I would say it's a uniter, which is to say that in Nevada, both parties are opposing final side voting. So it's already accomplished that. Yes. Uh, but here's the thing, people do think, oh, if you're talking about politics that somehow partisan it's divisive, we shouldn't touch that with business, but Kent shows what can be done. He's really the ideal model for this. Um, I don't know if anyone else has done what he's done from business perspective that the system is not partisan. Final Five voting is not a trojan horse for either party's advantage. In fact, in Nevada, we have funders of that Nevada initiative who are opposing each other in the candidate races in Nevada but are aligned on what the system should be to solve problems going forward. But that's great. But that's a little unusual right. Reform efforts tend to generate more support on the left and on the right. Yeah, this this this is true. And so we in the in the movement have to work very hard about there's about 250 do gooder democracy organizations in America right now, we sort of stopped counting and half of them have started in the last five years and 90% of them have an operating budget of a million and half for less. So it's a cottage industry fragmented undercapitalized hand to mouth. Uh, and and and we need to, we need to change that in order to be more coherent. There's a tremendous amount of, of donor capital willing to enter this this fight, but they don't know who actually get stuff done and who doesn't, uh, and it's, it's our job. It's coming on the mo, on the movement to separate. There's, there's donors, there's doers and there's dreamers. Uh, we need to make the donors more comfortable as to who are the doers that actually get these things done, uh, in the states, uh, and separate from the dreamers who have wonderful power point and are very aspirational but simply don't have the impact. And, and if I'm hearing you both right, the one thing you feel you need is money. Two things we need. Actually one thing more than money. And that is the convening power of business and the advocacy of business. How many of you have heard of final five voting? Probably, you know, none of. Okay, a couple of people. Okay, that's pretty good. Okay. But nobody knows this is a I'll go so far saying the key solution to our problems. Nobody's heard of it. So your your in the media, you're in front of your employees, you have a voice and to bring up this nonpartisan cross partisan systemic change. That's pro voter that re enfranchise is every one of your employees on the left and the right is totally one of the most important things so that it begins to be known. And then the second thing is the investment. It's $100 million, 100 companies, a million dollars each. This are these organizations that ken and I are a part of in these movements for final five voting. And the other thing Kent is talking about need the capital that it doesn't advance without the capital that, that uh, everyone wants to avoid ending up in the Disney dilemma where you're getting hammered by both sides and where your shareholders are angry that you get yourself in that mess, we all want to avoid that. The good news is that feasible? First of all, you can make it easy for your people to vote second, you can engage in education, fact based education on things like election, integrity importantly. However, you can also provide other loads of levels of support that don't involve all sorts of political risk, like helping your employees become poll workers and otherwise involved helping some of your having some of your technology people help county clerks upgrade their existing cyber practices, etcetera. So none of that is going to get you on the front page of the florida times with, with both Rs and Ds criticizing you. And then lastly working on these reform issues, these structural reform issues like gerrymandering and, and the rest that is literally a partisan neutral process. Uh, and it is possible to create that narrative that fits with that and makes a huge difference. Kathryn Kent, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. Very, very

DaVita

Company Information

World's Most Admired Companies
As of 2/1/2023

DaVita

Company Information

World's Most Admired CompaniesAs of 2/1/2023

World's Most Admired Companies
As of 2/1/2023