All right, that sounds great. Thank you so much. Well, this week, Minnesota voters made history choosing the first woman to lead the state. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar defeated Republican Representative Lisa Demuth by nearly 13 points. It's the largest margin of victory for a Minnesota governor's race in more than 30 years. And joining us now is the governor-elect. Thank you so much for coming in and congratulations.
All right. We want to ask you — I'd like to focus first on affordability, because that's one of the things I think most people want to ask you about. Health care premiums — we've got a graphic — they've gone up 10 to 21% going into 2027 after a double-digit increase the year before. A lot of this is because of federal cuts and federal extensions that have not continued. What can you do and what will you be able to do?
So when you look at what happened across the country, whether it's people speaking out in South Carolina, to Texas, to Iowa, to Kansas, this wasn't just about Minnesota, but it was about affordability. And Trump's tariffs, as well as these health care cuts, have hurt people in their everyday lives. They can feel it. They get those premiums in the mail. One of the things that happened was that 8 million people have been tossed off their health care, in large part because of the Medicaid cuts, but also because of the failure of the Republicans in Congress to extend the tax credit that helps people pay for their premiums. It was a real shocker. They wouldn't do it because it especially hurts rural areas, a lot of red states. I can do that in Minnesota as governor, and I made it very clear that you can extend the federal — we can do the state tax credit for our state. Ten states have already done it. New Mexico did it. They're the only ones that actually increased the number of people that get health care insurance. So if they don't do this in Washington, we can do it in Minnesota in the next session, right? Next year. However, with the changes and taking over the Senate, taking over the House, it's possible that they'll do it in Washington. So I've been very clear: if they don't do it there, we're going to do it in Minnesota. We're also going to work on helping small businesses to cover their employees — a huge problem. Prescription drugs, using the bulk purchasing power of the state government to get a better rate for drugs, and then also using the power of the Commerce Department when it comes to premiums.
All right. This is such a big deal for so many people right now. How quickly do you think you can get some kind of state tax credit passed, either through the legislature or through the executive power?
Well, the session isn't that long. It's not one of these go into all of next year. So I think we could do it very quickly. It's also possible that somehow this happens by the end of this year in Washington, or happens at the beginning of the year in Washington. So we'll know pretty quickly if we can do that. There's also a drug discount that's very helpful for rural hospitals called 340B, and I think that's something else that we should look at doing.
Okay, because people will welcome that. I know another area that you talked about — affordability is housing. You talked about building more housing. You talked about manufactured homes, more rural housing, making owning a home affordable again. How are you going to do that?
Well, more supply is really important here. Minnesota is 100,000 units short of housing, from single family to apartments. Rochester alone is 14,000 short. When you have more housing — and I am committed, with my running mate, Ben Schier, who knows a lot about rural housing, to build with the private sector these homes by the end of our term, the first term. Supply brings down costs, and it's pretty important. And there's new ways to build housing that makes it more affordable. There's a major unit in Edina, and there's one up in Grand Marais that uses modular homes. They build them in the factories and then in a warehouse. There was one in Detroit Lakes called Dynamic Homes, put them on trucks, and of course the outside is built on the site, and then you slip them inside. And that brings down time by like two years in some cases, and also brings down costs. Manufactured home — my husband grew up in a trailer home. We called them that back then. Five brothers in a single trailer home. Well, it's not your grandpa's trailer homes anymore. These manufactured homes are nicer, they're less expensive, but there's issues about how much the land — people own the homes, but then hedge funds have been boosting up the price of the land. So this is an existing bipartisan bill in the legislature that hasn't passed yet that I'm very interested in working on.
So the bill could make potentially the land cheaper. So, I mean, who's going to pay for these rights to the people that own those manufactured homes? And they'd be less expensive.
Yes. Representative Norris has been very involved in this, as well as many others. And so the idea is to give them some rights so that they have a chance to buy the land themselves, as like a co-op that has happened around the country and in Minnesota. Those are really specific ideas, but the whole idea here is to get through red tape in our state government. Things take too long. Permits take too long. Harder to bring in small businesses, harder to expand them. I made very clear, even on election night when I said, spoiler alert, you're not going to like everything I do, that I'm going to not move our state to the left or the right. I want to move our state to the center. I want to represent not just the people who voted for me, but everyone in our state. And to me, that means looking at what's working in our state. And there are a lot of things working, but what's broken that we need to fix, and what do we need to get rid of? And of course, rooting out the fraud with a top-to-bottom audit from day one.
