Humana Inc. commemorated its 50th anniversary last Wednesday, with celebrations in Louisville and CEO Mike McCallister and company co-founder David A. Jones ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Congratulations!

McCallister gave a quick retrospective in an NYSE interview available on Youtube. In March, he also talked to Fortune magazine for a piece on the health insurance industry and Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. On the latter, McCallister said:

I would describe the bill as a mixed bag. It does some good things. You can make the policy argument that getting 30 million more people covered is a good thing -- none of us want people outside the system. The issue of preexisting conditions does scare people; the No. 1 concern of most Americans is that they'll fall through the cracks. Do we want to keep our kids on our policies until they're 26? Sure. Would you like to be able to get preventive care without having to pay for that? Why not? But all these things cost money, so the bill is loaded up with all sorts of things that set bad incentives. The biggest takeaway from the bill is, it doesn't do much fundamentally to help with the underlying problem, which is that costs are too high and are rising too fast. This turned into more of an insurance market reform bill than health care reform.

In another health-care related review, Medtronic's former CEO, William Hawkins, spoke to MassDevice for an exclusive interview. Hawkins retired in April, turning over the company's reins to curent CEO Omar Ishrak. Keeping with company tradition, MassDevice reports, Hawkins presented Ishrak with a gift:

I gave him a globe...I said it's all about equalizing health care and the opportunity to extend our mission around the world. When I took over, 70 percent of our business was in the U.S. When I passed the baton, 55 percent of our business was in the U.S. – but 90 percent of the world's population is outside of the U.S.

Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical, was on PBS's Nightly Business Report last week for one of the program's segments, "How to Fix the Economy." Dow is hiring, Liveris told NBR's Susie Gharib:

We are. We are hiring because we`re investing. We`re investing in this economy and we`re investing for two very different reasons. One is shale gas and what that means to the United States in terms of competitiveness of energy, and in our case feedstock. So we`re building new facilities in Texas and Louisiana, $4 billion worth. So we`re hiring for that.

And in Michigan -- in particular in Michigan, but in other states, we`re investing in the alternative energy economy, batteries and battery materials and solar panels. And in Michigan that has been quite a welcome thing because we are retooling displaced automotive workers, giving them through community college programs, we`re retraining them, re-skilling them, and getting them to work in our new factories.

Now that Business Roundtable Today, the BRT's blog, is up and running we'll try to highlight CEO interviews like these on a regular basis.