* WCIA’S Mark Maxwell interviewed Chris Kennedy the other day. Click here to watch it all, but here’s an excerpt…

MAXWELL: Your recent polling, your internal polling, said you were a frontrunner, but yet it’s a big fight. You’ve got a long way to go. Seven other candidates gunning for that top spot, and there’s a lot of money in this race. JB Pritzker has $21 million already that he’s self-funding in his campaign. Are you going to be able to catch up there? How’s fundraising going lately? I know you brought on Bill Daley.

KENNEDY: Yeah, Bill Daley’s been incredible, and we’ll have the resources to compete. I’m not worried about the money.

MAXWELL: Are you going to cut a check?

KENNEDY: If you look at the number of donors we have, the number of volunteers, the support across the state is incredible. I know I’m ahead in the polls, but I’m gonna run this like, uh, like I’m the underdog and I think that’s an important message to people as well.

Bill Daley’s arrival was announced on July 19th…

“It was a bad quarter, no question about it,” Daley told me. “There was a lot of political outreach. (But) there wasn’t even a finance committee, just a committee of stakeholders.”

Fixing that is the first thing on his agenda, Daley said. A full finance committee is being assembled (Daley declined to disclose any names), with an initial meeting set for next week. Lists of fundraising targets will be assembled, and regular calls and contacts made, he continued. Some of that will involve the candidate himself. “Chris has to spend more time on it.”

Since then, Kennedy’s campaign has reported just $34,700 in contributions. Now, he could be holding back his deposits in order to make a big splash at the end of the quarter. But you’d think a candidate who’s been under fire for not raising enough money would want to get out in front of that story by rolling out some big donors.

* On to healthcare…

MAXWELL: I want to ask you about healthcare for a minute because a lot of the candidates are weighing in. There was a recent fight over single payer, public option. And I want to see if I can get you to weigh in here. What direction would you like to see the country, and what direction would you like to see the state of Illinois go in how it provides healthcare for people?

KENNEDY: I think there are, there are, there are great examples to us around the country. I don’t think we need to invent it all ourselves in Illinois. I think if you at what happened under Governor Romney in Massachusetts and the expansion of Medicaid there and the ability for the state to provide great coverage to people at all economic levels.

MAXWELL: We’ve expanded Medicaid in Illinois. One in four residents in this state are on Medicaid.

KENNEDY: And I think we can continue to do that, and in effect migrate towards a single payer system. I think we need to free up Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate pricing.

MAXWELL: That sounds like a slow incremental process you’re describing, migrate towards single payer. How long do you think that would take?

KENNEDY: I don’t know. But I think we’re moving, we’re moving in that direction. It’s clear to me that that’s where we’ll end up, both as a state and as a country over time. And we ought to be on the front-burner here in Illinois.

MAXWELL: You’re describing it as inertia, something that’s already on the track, and maybe a spectator. Would you push that faster?

KENNEDY: Oh, I’d definitely push it faster, absolutely. And I think we should continue to expand as best we can by negotiating with the federal government what, uh, what issues and who can be covered in Illinois, then do a better job recruiting people who haven’t signed up to sign up for the available care in our state now. And I think that’s how we get full coverage for everyone. There’s coverage, I mean, the fact is that we’re just handling it poorly. People are getting sick and going to emergency rooms, and it doesn’t have to be like that. The problem with the state is largely we look so, we look inward and not outward, and we ought to look to other states and see what great outcomes are occurring there. We could provide better coverage and better healthcare for people in our state.

MAXWELL: So you mention Massachusetts, RomneyCare. It’s a deep blue state there. They’ve had some trial balloons and things on the national healthcare scene. Any other states or any other practices that you’ve seen in relation to how you’d lower drug prices or how you would make medicine more affordable for average Americans?

KENNEDY: I think some of the things they’ve done in California are helpful. And California, places like California and Texas have massive populations, and they’ve begun to negotiate. And I think we can create a consortium with other states, cooperate. I know that we’re competitive with the people in Indiana and Wisconsin and Iowa, but we can work with them and create regional competition, or regional buying power, that allows us to use the market to drive down pricing.

I’m not sure I completely follow, but OK.