Quotes from Ron Williams

When I retired from Aetna, I became part of the private equity world. It turned out to be a natural fit.

For insurance solvency, ongoing plan participation is vital.

I have seen the healthcare system from many angles, including as a patient.

Every institution is perfectly capable of forgetting what it has learned in three years.

If an individual sticks up a bank and walks off with $25,000, there are consequences. If someone who really could have had an insurance policy consumes $25,000 worth of health care, everyone else pays for that.

It's difficult to compete against a player that's also refereeing the game.

I believe in the power of a positive, high-performance culture, which begins with strong ethical values at the core.

When I was a CEO, I thought I understood private equity. I didn't. And what I've learned since my retirement, and since becoming directly involved in the world of private equity, points the way to a new career path for thousands of talented senior executives - and a new engine for value creation.

Deliver bad news early and personally.

My belief is that a positive culture works best because people want to meet or exceed expectations, not demands.

We confuse insurance with our moral obligation to provide health-care services to people. And what we try to do is finance our moral obligation through the insurance system, which punishes the people who are fiscally responsible to buy insurance.

In my career, there have been many things I am fortunate enough to be proud of. Yet one of the things I feel most strongly about is the culture we created during the ten years I was at Aetna, and its enduring impact.

are desperate for people of every background with the ability to formulate a compelling vision of the future and to inspire others to help make that vision a

Growing into leadership begins with self-leadership—which starts with discovering and nurturing the inner drive that will spur you to seemingly impossible achievements. That drive may be moving toward your passion, if you're lucky enough to know

Younger participants in the exchanges and who purchase individual insurance paid more, and they just didn't see the value, and therefore, they did not come forward and sign up.

I think the U.S. is conflicted. When it comes to our own health care, we all want the best - access to the latest and most important technology. At the same time, health care is typically purchased in an institutional setting. So we purchase it in the aggregate, but we consume it as individuals.

I've been on record since 2005 saying we need to find a way to eliminate the use of the pre-existing condition. The way to do that is really to get everyone in the insurance pool, and that way, we'll have people who need health services today, some who need it tomorrow, and some who won't need it for quite some time.

There are several problems with the ACA's reliance on means-based inclusion criteria and mandatory participation in exchanges - the complexity of the exchange mechanism, and the potential for income-based subsidies to become a disincentive to earn if insurance rates escalate for those beyond the income threshold.

I think reasonable people could agree that, at some point, there's enough income that someone should be expected to participate in the health-care system.

In health care, you really need a balance of people who need health care today, tomorrow, and in the future.

Every morning, I have high expectations, and then I confront the reality of what happens at 4 o'clock.

After much reflection, I have concluded that the federal individual mandate, which requires all Americans to purchase health insurance starting in 2014, will not be upheld.

The federal government should encourage rather than micromanage market reform in all 50 states. Since health care is local, private-sector innovation in conjunction with state-level reform of the individual and small-group markets is a better approach.

I am not a lawyer or an expert on the Constitution. But as the chairman and CEO of a major health plan, I had a ringside seat to the entire health-care reform process.