you there, but let me ask you if you succeed in that primary, is that a message you re going to be repeating in the fall that you were proud to vote for obamacare? and i ask you because there s some news out of virginia this week, that under obamacare, under the current law of the land, you got a major insurer, aetna, pulling up, leaving the individual insurance market in that state. a lot of people in virginia say, that law isn t going so well right now. would you tell voters outside the democratic party you are proud to vote for obamacare? i will and i have before. i think that what happens for me every week is meeting families whose lives have been saved who haven t had to go through bankruptcy because of this. nobody plans on developing a catastrophic illness. it s important for thensurance companies not to get to write all of the rules. in virginia, we bent the cost curve by about $3,500 per year in terms of reduced premiums over when they would have been. and if the republican
he campaigned on his business record on his bill to make better deals than politicians in the past have. does the president view the spending bill as a good deal? yes. sean, can you say that no one with a pre-existing condition will not pay more? i think we ve done everything we can to do that. and every measure that the president has taken further not only ensures that people with pre-existing conditions get covered in every scenario but also bends the cost curve down. can you guarantee it? with you ll due respect, i can t guarantee something but everything that the president has done, including the action that he took this morning to work with members of congress does everything by every account to bend the cost curve down to help anybody that would potentially fall into that small group of individuals to get to bend the cost curve down who
ultimately, that s going to be their decision to do it and i think we continue to feel optimistic about the direction that we ve seen the legislation go. mike? i want to revisit the president s comments and his tweets about the spending bill he campaigned on his business record on his bill to make better deals than politicians in the past have. does the president view the spending bill as a good deal? yes. sean, can you say that no one with a pre-existing condition will not pay more? i think we ve done everything we can to do that. and every measure that the president has taken further not only ensures that people with pre-existing conditions get covered in every scenario but also bends the cost curve down. can you guarantee it? with you ll due respect, i can t guarantee something but everything that the president has done, including the action
that he took this morning to work with members of congress does everything by every account to bend the cost curve down to help anybody that would potentially fall into that small group of individuals to get to bend the cost curve down who have pre-existing conditions. so the answer is, yes, we have done everything possible to get that thing down and ensure that, number one, the potential is as small as possible. it covers people with pre-existing conditions, number one. it does everything to ensure if a state seek as waiver that they are still covered. it looks at every single possibility to ensure that people get the care that they need. you criticized president obama rushing through his health care plan. is this not being rushed through, the legislation hasn t been put up for public debate, this latest piece of legislation? every piece of legislation evolves. we had a piece that makes it a
an additional safety net, which is frankly what that is, not on the coverage, but on the cost, that that could ensure that the cost curve further bent downward. and the president agreed. at the end of the day, look, the president talked about this from the beginning. he wants to work with members to make it the strongest possible bill to have the strongest outcome for the american people and a healthcare system in which both the cost continues to go down. that s one point that we keep forgetting in this discussion. it s not just replace obamacare. obamacare is dying on the vine. the costs are spiralling out of control, deductibles are going up. this isn t a theoretical discussion. aetna is pulling out of states and counties around the country are going down to one in some case zero choices. so this isn t a question of just replacing something. we are actually at a point where if we don t do something, some people in this country will have no options for coverage. we ve got to do someth