'Meet the Press' transcript for October 18, 2009

GREGORY:  But you've got challenges from the insurance companies; you've got, in the political middle on Capitol Hill, concerns about costs; and even from the left.  This was the headline in Politico:  "Labor chief takes on the White House." This is Gerald McEntee, the president of AFSCME, which is government workers across the country, and he writes this in a USA Today op-ed piece: "McEntee said union workers have often chosen to accept lower wages in exchange for better and more costly health insurance.  He said union members...won't be afraid to remind politicians of that in next year's election.  `We worked for all these people.  We worked for Obama.  ...  And what do we get for it?  We not only don't get anything for it, we get a slap in the face.'" And the criticism is that the taxes for this health reform ultimately will hit the middle class.

MS. JARRETT:  Listen, David, what we're, what we're very cognizant here is that we have to reduce costs, we have to improve coverage, we've got to make affordable, quality health care for all Americans.  Those are the basic parameters that the president set forth when we gan--we began this process. It's hard.  It's complicated.  If this was easy, it would've happened under the five decades that there have been efforts for healthcare reform.  But what we've seen right now is, for the first time in history, five committees have passed legislation.  There's an agreement on 90 percent of what we're trying to accomplish here and there's some momentum to move forward right now.  So are there last-minute wranglings?  Are there going to be people who are trying to maneuver?  Sure there are.  But I think that the momentum under President Obama is clearly moving forward now.

GREGORY:  Will he push for a public option before he signs any kind of reform?

MS. JARRETT:  The president has made it clear throughout the process, he said it in his speech before Congress that he thinks that the public option is the right solution.  He thinks it will enhance competition and he thinks it'll reduce costs and it'll give people choices.  And he said that throughout the process.

GREGORY:  But...

MS. JARRETT:  So he's a big believer in the public plan.

GREGORY:  But the question I'm asking is will he push for it and demand it here is the--in the final version of reform?

MS. JARRETT:  He's pushed for it, certainly, but he's realistic to say we've got to look at all options.  He has said very clearly he thinks it's the best option, and we'll see what happens.

GREGORY:  So he's not demanding that it's in there.

MS. JARRETT:  He's not demanding that it's in there.  He thinks it's the best possible choice.  But I think, David, let's not underestimate how much progress we've made.  The fact that there's agreement on so much means that we are right on the brink of delivering for the American people, and that's a positive sign for our country.

GREGORY:  But, you know, there's a lot of stalwart supporters of this president who look at healthcare reform in the context of other things that he promised in the campaign, and what do we see?  A promise for universal health care; well, you've got 17 million people who wouldn't be insured under this plan.  A promise for a public option; now you're saying he doesn't demand it. You know, the mantra of the campaign was "Yes, we can." Has that become maybe?

MS. JARRETT:  No, it has not.  It has definitely become yes, we can.  If you look at the five bills that have been passed, they provide more, more reassurance to the American people that they're going to have the kind of affordable health care, that they're going to reduce their costs, that they're not going to have to choose between paying their rent and paying for their health care, that they--if they have a pre-existing condition they're going to be covered, if they want to go in and have all kinds of exams that will prevent illnesses that they're going to be covered by that.  There's so much in these bills that is going to benefit the American people.  The--we've come so far, and we can't lose sight of that.  Are we there yet?  Have we crossed the finish line?  No.  But under President Obama, we're absolutely committed to delivering on behalf of the American people.

GREGORY:  Before we go, I want to get your comment on a couple of developing stories.  Swine flu; it turns out there's a big delay in the vaccines reaching communities.  There's some 10 to 12 million fewer vaccine doses available, and yet we know that younger kids are getting sicker more frequently, with deadlier results.  Did the government overpromise in terms of being able to deal with this?

MS. JARRETT:  No.  And we've been working hard over the course of the summer. It is science.  You can only produce a vaccine as quickly as it will grow. And we've been working very hard to get the information out.  We've been working with the governors and the mayors across our country.  Anyone who has questions should go on flu.gov to see how you can receive your vaccine.  We encourage everyone to take the vaccine as soon as it is available.  We are focusing every single day on making sure that we can get out ahead of this the best way we can, but you can only push science as fast as it will go.

GREGORY:  But the delay is going to have an impact.

MS. JARRETT:  The day--delay will have some impact, but I think what's really important is that people are cognizant of what symptoms to look out for, that they take reasonable precautions.  There's a lot that we can do to, to keep ourselves from getting the illness.  If you do get sick, please stay home.  If you are wondering whether you have the right symptoms, you can go on flu.gov and, and find out for yourself without having to always go to a doctor.  But if you get very ill, of course, go to the doctor.  And then just the reasonable precautions we know about:  if you sneeze, cover your, cover your mouth, etc.  So it is a serious illness.  There are 41 states now where we have serious outbreaks.  You're right, the pediatric fatalities have already been larger that we've--than we've seen in normal flu outbreaks, and so it is a serious illness and we encourage everybody as soon as you can to get vaccinated.

GREGORY:  Valerie Jarrett, thank you very much.  We actually get more of you today.

MS. JARRETT:  Yes.

GREGORY:  You'll stick around, you'll be part of our conversation about A Woman's Nation with Maria Shriver and John Podesta coming up in a few minutes. Stay where you are.

We're now going to introduce by remote chairman of the Banking Committee, Senator Chris Dodd; and Republican Whip, Senator Jon Kyl.

Senators, welcome both of you back to the program.

SEN. JON KYL (R-AZ):  Thank you.

SEN. CHRIS DODD (D-CT):  Thank you, David.

GREGORY:  Senator Dodd, I want to start with you.

SEN. DODD:  Yeah.

GREGORY:  You are involved in these negotiations to figure out the final form of healthcare legislation.  And you're hearing from Valerie Jarrett this morning, a senior adviser to the president, he will not demand a public option as most of his supporters want.  Will it be in there?  Should it be in there?

SEN. DODD:  Well, it should be in there, and--because for a number of reasons.  Not just for the politics of it; but if you're trying to increase competition, drive down costs, reduce the impact on the federal budget, these are all reasons why a public option is necessary if you're truly trying to get your arms around this.  And what we've drafted here in, in these bills, I think, gives us that opportunity and that chance.  In the absence of that, the alternate is to, of course, to make this more affordable by driving up subsidies, which increase the cost of the bill.  So we have some tough choices to make.  But I think the public option makes the most sense...

GREGORY:  OK.

SEN. DODD:  ...if, in fact, you want competition.  So that's why we're going to do it.

GREGORY:  So how is it going to, how is it going to happen?

SEN. DODD:  Many states have only one or two insurance companies.

GREGORY:  How's it going to happen?  The president's not going to push for it...

SEN. DODD:  Well, we're going to...

GREGORY:  ...who's going to push this across the finish line.

SEN. DODD:  Well, the president's deeply involved, and you heard the statements from Valerie that he's very much for it, said so again the other day.  And my hope is that when we bring these two bills together over the next number of days that we'll present to the Senate an option that includes that strong public option.  Then the Senate will obviously, the full Senate, as Jon knows, will have an opportunity to vote it, to take it out of the bill, to modify it in some way.  But my strong belief is we ought to include that as we move forward in the Senate.

GREGORY:  But aren't we beyond--Senator, aren't we beyond strong beliefs?  I mean, isn't this brass tacks time?  What have you got in terms of the votes? You've got one Republican senator who's not for it, you've got conservative Democrats who are not for it.  They seem to have most of the influence over the final package here.

SEN. DODD:  Well, David, you'll recall just this even spring I've had a number of bills that have come out, they came out of committee with one-vote margins.  And when you end up on the floor of the Senate, you find sometimes you get more.  About half the Senate has been involved already between the Health Committee and the Finance Committee.  The other half of our Senate colleagues have only had to give talks about this, and they'd like to express themselves.  So I haven't given up on this.  We had the, the credit card legislation, which I drafted that came out of the Banking Committee with a one-vote margin, passed on the floor of the Senate 90-to-5.  The same was true with the tobacco legislation, came out of the committee with a one-vote margin, passed the Senate 85-to-7 or something like that.  So I'm still confident when we get to the floor and, and you've got to make a choice between bringing down costs affecting the budget as well as increasing competition, then we have a good, good chance of including the public option in the bill.

GREGORY:  Senator Kyl, let me bring you in here.  In terms of who's got the most influence over this process, I mentioned Gerald McEntee, the head of the AFSCME union.  This is something that he said in an op-ed for The Wall Journal this week.  He writes this:  "Now we've got a Democrat in the White House and we expect some positive things.  It looks like we catered to Senator [Olympia] Snowe.  My God, she's a Republican, I thought we won." If you look at who does have influence over here, why is the Republican Party in the Congress completely opposed?  Don't you have somebody who's got more similar views influencing the process?

SEN. KYL:  Well, first of all, it's obvious there's a big fight going on within the Democratic Party between the House and Senate, between moderates and more liberal members of the, of the senators on the Democratic side. Republicans are kind of on the sideline here.  We offered a lot of amendments, both in the HELP Committee and in the Finance Committee, they were all rejected on party line votes.  The bill that's being written right now is being written in Harry Reid's office, behind closed doors, with Chris and Max Baucus and the leader and others.  No Republicans need apply to come into that room.  I think, though, if I could, David, it's a little bit beside the point, this whole question of the public option.  It's an important issue, but it's not the most important issue.  And at the end of the day, while I totally disagree with Chris about whether it's a good idea to have it in there, I think he's right that in a form it will be in there.  But what they're really good at doing is putting it in a different package, putting a different color ribbon around it and saying, "Well, that's--it's only the public option.  If things don't work out in a couple of years" or something like that.  And that's the concern that a lot of Republicans have.  It's why we've offered alternatives that do not rely upon a big government takeover and a public insurance company, but rather use the market that we have today, focusing on patients and trying to insure that we can both bring down costs and increase access to care without totally reforming the entire healthcare system.

GREGORY:  I just want to pick up on, on one point, Senator Dodd, the idea of a public option in some form.  One of the things that's been talked about is the idea of a trigger, a kind of Washington language for the idea that if in a, in a private system you don't have enough competition, you don't have enough, you know, competition bringing down prices ultimately for the consumer, that a government plan could kick in later on down in the line.  Would you support that?

SEN. KYL:  Absolutely not.  It's...

SEN. DODD:  Is that for me, David?

GREGORY:  That's for you, Senator Dodd, yes.

SEN. KYL:  Oh, I'm sorry.

SEN. DODD:  Oh.  Well, listen, I--as I said, in the HELP Committee bill we have a very strong public option that does exactly what I've described.  And obviously, to move forward here, my hope is we'll keep that.  But let me also suggest something to you, David, here.  I thought Olympia Snowe, my--our colleague from Maine, said it very well the other day.  When history calls, history calls.  What are the alternatives here if we do nothing, as apparently some are suggesting?  And by the way, as Jon knows, in the Health Committee, which I chaired over the summer here, 161 amendments, more than half the amendments adopted in that mark-up were amendments offered by the Republican side, which we accepted as part of that bill.  But if you look that in the next seven years we could have premium costs go from $13,000 a year to $24,000, 3.5 million jobs could be lost in the process.  The cost of business could double to nearly $1 trillion as a result of doing nothing.  The impact of doing nothing is so much more costly than what we're talking about here that my hope would be that we, in these coming days here, get together on this.  The American public cannot withstand more years of rising costs, rising premiums and more unemployment.  That's why this is so important.

GREGORY:  You know, it's interesting, Senator Kyl, in that vein, in terms of this kind of moral imperative, you and other Republicans have said this healthcare reform should be opposed, and one of the major reasons you cite is how much money it costs, how much it could potentially add to the deficit, although the president says it'll be deficit-neutral.  And yet when you talk about the war in Afghanistan and the commanders should have more of their troops, I've never heard you say that that should be deficit-neutral, that war costs should somehow not break the bank.  Why is that disparity there?

SEN. KYL:  David, no country can afford to scrimp and save or try to win a war on the cheap.  The president himself has said that the war in Afghanistan against these terrorists who killed over 3,000 American on September 11, 2001, is a war of necessity.  You have to win it.  And Americans throughout our history have sacrificed when war has called for us to do that.

GREGORY:  And is it a, is it a necessity to tackle the fact that there are more and more Americans who die because they don't have access to health insurance?

SEN. KYL:  I'm not sure that it's a fact that more and more people die because they don't have health insurance; but because they don't have health insurance, the care is not delivered in the best and most efficient way. Republicans have a lot of good ideas--and all those amendments Chris was talking about where technical amendments.  We have very good ideas about how to tackle this problem one piece at a time and basically regain the trust of the American people by taking one step at a time rather than saying that we have to have a trillion-dollar bill.  Yes, that will hurt our deficit. Remember, we just had the figures come out earlier this week, a $1.4 trillion deficit, more than all of the last four budget deficits combined.  So when we're spending on war and when we're spending on other things we need to have, we don't have to spend as much on health care.  We can do it one step at a time to target the problems that we have with targeted solutions.

GREGORY:  Senator Dodd, one more question on health care.  And to bring a bottom line in here, crystal ball time.  After all of this debate, you have said getting a pretty good bill is not enough.  So in the end, what version of healthcare reform gets passed?

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