their constituents. talk to the families out there that are losing their coverage. talk to the families who are making $50,000 a year and have an insurance card through obamacare but they don t have any care because they can t afford the deductible, talk to the small businesses that are having to end their health care coverage for their employees because of the rules coming from obamacare, talk to the large businesses who are having huge challenges affording the health coverage for their employees. this is a system that is imploding and has failed the american people. that s where the president s passion comes from. that s where my passion comes from, to move us in a direction that we actually put in place a system that works for patients, works for the american people. all right. with all due respect, you gave me an explanation of what you d like to see but you didn t give me a specific. i want to ask you about a specific that the president tweeted about. he said this yesterday. if
of congress made at you. let me but there was another portion of the tape that you have not referenced at all. here it is. yes, i think he s i think he s crazy. and i i don t say that. no, lightly. lightly as kind of, yeah, you know, a goofy guy. you appear to be referencing the president there with senator reed. can you expound upon that a little bit. how concerned are you about the president? actually what i was talking about is the president s budget. if you go earlier in that tape, i talk about the fact that omb went through the budget and appeared to zero out many really vital programs without doing a careful analysis of the impact on communities, on vulnerable citizens, on veterans, on people across the united states. so when i said i m worried,
you ve got the va system and then you have the individual small group market where obamacare focused its attention on setting up the exchanges. and it s that area where we ve seen absolute failure. we ve got 40% of the counties in this nation that only have one issue or one insurance company providing coverage, so that s no choice at all. next year you ll have dozens of counties that have nobody offering coverage. so this system is imploding, it is failing. and the president s passion, our passion, our concern is to make certain that we put in place a system that actually works for patients. look, you were an elected official. you know how politics works. you know how to count votes. you know where the votes are. it s pretty clear a full repeal can t be done. it s pretty clear somehow rescinding the medicaid expansion, that the support is not there. so what s realistic? what do you ask congress to do now? what is one thing that you want congress to do right now that s doable, that s
out against the policies at guantanamo. i think for that reason there s some hope that he will quit if he s not empowered to do his job, but those are the sorts of people i think this president should be hiring and who the country should be looking at, people who are going to speak out and quit their jobs if the president doesn t empower them to do them. you know, there was at the pentagon when it was announced on friday that general kelly was going to be the next chief of staff, several people said, well, you need this sort of four-star general. these are men who know how to get things done, they know how to get people to follow orders and that s all very true, but also to be a successful white house chief of staff, you ve got to come with a little bit a lot of political know-how, and there i think we could see some issues coming up with general kelly. as a four-star general, he knows how to talk to congress, he knows how to appear on capitol hill and he knows how to schmooze, b
the same questions i asked secretary price. do you accept the premise that the efforts to repeal obamacare are fully dead and it is now time to refer to this as our national health care system and it is his job and your job to make it work? i don t accept the premise that we should not proceed to reform the law. there are some very well problems in the law, secretary price is right about that and he identified them. the problem is that congress as my friend and colleague lamar alexander has often said does not do comprehensive well. what we need to do is to go through the normal process, identify the problems, have hearings, hear from experts, hear from all the stakeholders, and produce a series of bills to fix the real flaws in the affordable care act. first on my list would be to stabilize the insurance markets