IBM CEO in Letter to Trump Addresses Jobs, Health Care
November 16 2016 - 5:11AM
Dow Jones News
By Rachael King
International Business Machines Corp. CEO Ginni Rometty
published an open letter to President-elect Donald Trump outlining
her recommendations on health care, infrastructure spending and
other issues.
The letter is her first comment on the prospect of a Trump
administration since Mr. Trump, shortly before the election,
criticized IBM and other companies for shifting U.S. jobs
overseas.
The letter offers support for some of Mr. Trump's policies and
advice on national issues--adding along the way that IBM is the
largest technology employer in the U.S. Last year IBM hired more
U.S. employees than in the five years prior, the letter said, and
it has thousands of open positions.
The Donald J. Trump for President organization didn't
immediately reply to a request for comment.
Silicon Valley generally has viewed Mr. Trump's victory as a
blow to the tech industry, as the president-elect has been a critic
of Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. as well as IBM.
Among other technology executives, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offered
Mr. Trump congratulations in a message on Twitter, as did
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, while Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya
Nadella posted a congratulatory message on LinkedIn , with a link
to a longer blog post by the company's president and chief legal
officer.
Mr. Trump, in a Nov. 6 campaign speech in Minnesota, said IBM
had laid off 500 workers in Minneapolis and moved their jobs to
India and other countries. Mr. Trump also called out Ford for
laying off 794 workers in St. Paul and MoneyGram for laying off 408
workers and moving those jobs overseas.
"If a company wants to leave Minnesota, fire their workers and
move to another country, and then ship their products back into the
United States...we will make them pay a 35% tax," he said.
The letter offers support for another of Mr. Trump's proposals,
to end tax-code incentives for businesses to keep their overseas
earnings out of the country. "Many billions of dollars of American
companies' earnings do not come home because of an outdated and
punitive tax system, " Ms. Rometty wrote.
The change would "free up capital that companies of all sizes
can reinvest in their U.S. operations, training and education
programs for their employees, and research and development
programs," the letter continues.
IBM in 2015 spent more than half its annual $5.4 billion annual
research and development budget in the U.S.
IBM also supports Mr. Trump's proposed investment in
infrastructure such as roads, bridges, buildings and other public
facilities, Ms. Rometty wrote, adding that the infrastructure's
performance would benefit by the inclusion of networked sensors and
artificial intelligence, technologies that IBM offers.
Similarly, Ms. Rometty in her letter suggested reducing
health-care costs through the use of information technology and
data analytics. IBM said it operates one of the largest
employer-sponsored health plans in the U.S. Health-care costs could
be reduced by analyzing data to detect fraudulent Medicare claims,
she wrote, citing a 2009 IBM position paper.
Ms. Rometty's letter also called for giving veterans the best
health care possible. IBM recently announced a pilot program to
help Department of Veterans Affairs oncologists treat 10,000
veterans using genomic analysis powered by Watson, the company's
artificial-intelligence computing system.
Write to Rachael King at rachael.king@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 16, 2016 04:56 ET (09:56 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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