The following is the transcript of an interview with Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Aug. 3, 2025.
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MARGARET BRENNAN: We turn now to New Mexico's Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. She joins us from Santa Fe. Governor, two out of five New Mexicans are on Medicaid. You've got a lot of rural hospitals. Have you figured out how to implement everything Dr. Oz just laid out?
GOV. LUJAN GRISHAM: Absolutely not. There is no real way to implement this. It's more paperwork for everyone. It's more paperwork for federal government, for state governments, for county governments, for local hospitals, for independent providers. And you know what Americans really hate, Margaret? When you go to your primary care physician and you spend 20 minutes sitting at a chair, not even on the exam table, while they are inputting data into a computer. So this doesn't make any sense. We should be a society and a country that is connecting people to healthcare providers. I think the one thing that Dr. Oz represents that's a fair representation, is we should be healthier as Americans. All right. We need to be moving out of poverty. We need drug prices- we should talk about that, to come down. So go after insurance companies. Do manufacturing here. Make sure we can negotiate fair prices. Let states do that, because I guarantee you, we'll do a better job than the federal government. And lastly, get people early, easy access today, more than half, or about half, our small businesses don't even offer health care coverage. So you can get a job. but now what?
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah, well, you said, though- in your state, because as a governor, you're going to have to figure this out. You have reserve cash from some oil and gas revenues, as I understand it, that have been put aside. Doesn't that show it is possible for the federal government to shift more responsibility back to the states? That's the argument conservatives are making.
GOV. LUJAN GRISHAM: They are and it's temporary. There is no way any state, including this one—which, frankly, I am really proud of, we are in really good financial shape that takes planning and effort. You know, our job projections continue to be met and exceed, unlike the federal jobs report, which is going in the opposite direction. So I don't know where all these jobs are going to be in this anemic economy. I mean, it's so bad. The last time it was this bad, I was in college, and let me tell you, that was a very long time ago. And so yes, temporarily we can do that. But you can't do it over the long haul. The lost minimally to New Mexico over less than a decade is between 12 and $13 billion dollars and when, not if, rural hospitals and local providers close their doors. I can do this better than any other state. The last governor completely canceled behavioral health. Six years later, we are still reeling from trying to rebuild. We put a billion dollars into behavioral health just this last legislative session. It is not so easy to rebuild something out of nothing.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the $50 billion Rural Health Care Fund under this Republican law is supposed to give people the— your—states like yours, the ability to come and say, we need this extra cash. Are you going to have to ask for that?
GOV. LUJAN GRISHAM: I'm going to ask for every dollar the federal government has put aside anywhere that benefits a New Mexican. So you got 50 billion. That's $1 billion for each state, if it was even. Do you know how much money it would take to shore up rural hospitals? More than a billion. And to put that in perspective—let me do this, it's a billion just for behavioral health, it's a billion plus just to keep people's coverage, it's another billion for prescription drugs, it's a billion dollars for rural provider delivery investments, and that's only 50 hospitals. You have hundreds of hospitals. Hundreds. 400 rural hospitals across America that will shutter. So that's the number at it is. We are- how do we pick these rural hospitals? And if you pick a Southeastern rural hospital in New Mexico, what about the rural hospital in western New Mexico. Economies fail. People have to move away. You don't have any OBGYN care. That whole area collapses, and they are reducing rural health care delivery by about 134 billion. So the 50 billion is just to make someone somewhere feel like they recognize that this is a disaster. $900 billion out of Medicaid is catastrophic, straight up.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor, we ran through a lot of material here. I have more questions for you, but very quickly—can you tell me—you deployed the National Guard to counter unrest in New Mexico. How is that different from what the president did in California?
GOV. LUJAN GRISHAM: Well, they're not policing. They're doing the back end work so that trained community policing, and members of that training, right—those local police officers, they're on the streets. What we have in this country is a shortage of police officers. What I have in New Mexico is a partnership. So they're doing all of the—they answer all of the emergency calls. They handle all the traffic clearance when we've got a crash. And it is working, we're beginning to see more productive fentanyl drug dealing high end arrests than we did without the guard. And I'm really proud of that work. This is about partnering and leveraging, not about indiscriminately going after individuals who have not committed serious crimes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Thank you for your time today. 'Face the Nation' will be right back.
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