think anyone can but i can tell you in a district like mine, rural appalachia where the average income is just a little over $30,000 a year, the preponderance of the people come from my rural district. the estimates if you aggravate the county numbers, it s 60,000 people at least. here s my question to you, there s no way the cbo can score this bill as cutting $880 billion from medicaid over ten years and for no one in your district to take it on the chin. well, i tell you what they can t do, either, you know, that s the same cbo, chris, that said that 20 million people were going to sign up for the exchanges and they haven t so i don t think i think we have to take with a grain of salt what cbo says. but what we re going to do, chris, is we re going to give governor john kasich the flexibility and the controls to manage his medicaid population. we re not going to pull the rug out congressman, there s going to be less money spent in your state on medicaid. that s an arithmeti
governor john kasich the flexibility and the controls to manage his medicaid population. we re not going to pull the rug out congressman, there s going to be less money spent in your state on medicaid. that s an arithmetic inescapable fact. don t take it from me, paul ryan the speaker of the house was on hugh hewitt show in which he boasted about a fact, about capping the growth of it, reducing the spending and called it bigger than welfare reform. there is no way under this bill that as much money in medicaid is going to be spent in the state of ohio tin years from now as it is now. that s going to hurt people in your district. chris, if we don t do something to reform medicaid, to make sure it s sustainable, what s going to happen by 2026 when the cbo tells us it will cost our nation a trillion a year. it s better to give these people an opportunity to purchase health care they can afford that s of their own choosing, not something that s mandated and handed out. let s don t fo
put in place a model that s going to make health care better and le expensive. that s what we are focussed on. so i tha the problem is there could be a period of time right there where as many as 20 million americans are without health care then? i mean, you married the speaker today. we don t want to quote, in his terms, pull the rug out basically repeal and delay is what you re saying. you repeal, but there s going to be a phase in time. we re saying make that as short as possible. it shouldn t be two, three, four year phase in time. it should have quickly. this congress, this year. that s what makes sense to us. the american people understand that. i think anyone understands it, you have to have some time for the market to adjust. so you can put in kind of the plans and the policies that make sense that actually help families. that s what we re focussed on doing. but it shouldn t stretch out for years and years, it should be done relatively quickly. understood, the head
everybody salutes when they go off to war, members of congress always have and they have done this for years. folks watching right now in afghanistan. military health care. benefits and military retiree benefits. i don t want somebody to tell me it s a fiscal issue if the promise has been explicitly made to an 18-year-old kids who goes into a recruitment center and is told you re going to see the world and it s going to be great and exciting and plus you get these benefits and then congress pulls the rug out. congress has to come together. right now folks are watching your show in afghanistan and heard congress is cutting their benefits. congress has got to fix it. paul, come back more often. we love having you here. a special series on msnbc. taking the hill is returning sunday, january 26th, at 1:00 p.m. former congressman and iraq war veteran patrick murphy will host a one-hour conversation about
instead the whole world is changed. our position has gotten weaker. jim rose is traveling with secretary of state john kerry asked him today a short time ago if he thinks assad is going to live up to the agreement an kerry responded to this way, quote, we re going to have to make him. well, how? i mean, where is the teeth in all of this? yeah, i really feel badly for secretary kerry. i mean, he was out there two weeks ago compareing assad to hitler and basically imimplying we were going to war the next day t. president pulled the rug out without consulting him when he said he was going to congress. i think john kerry is trying to make a bad case. i understand what he s trying to do. again, we lost so much leverage, our only leverage is through putin and putin, remember, is the person who was just trying to re-establish russia as a power. so he has no reason to be doing us any pafrs. whatever he does good for us is