scott brown. former republican senator from massachusetts and fox news contributor back home in boston. hello to you, welcome back here. what do you think of the answers you have heard so far? i think there s a lot going on, bill. they are trying to rewrite history. the spin machine is out trying to rewrite the president s comments and have more people believe he just misspoke. no, he was crystal clear as to what the options were. if you remember when i was elected, they held up my swearing in so i could not go down there and stop it, so they ran this through strictly a partisan maneuver using reconciliation and as a result there were a lot of other amendments that the republicans put forth especially on the grandfathering issue that every democrat voted against so to see them rewrite history is laughable and completely leaves the lack of trust that the american people have with
would have passed. but he s now got a credibility problem because it s clear that when you say period, when you put a period at the end and say repeatedly you won t have the to change your plan, period, you will be able to keep your doctor, period, it means period, 100%. being 95% right doesn t make it you have to be 100% the truth. it doesn t suggest to anybody that a couple months after the law is passed they should pull out the federal register and flip through to page 34,550. a lot of pages. and find how sebelius is tightening the noose the on the grandfathering clause so they can find out period didn t mean period, it meant asterisk and read the a tab in the federal register. what they have to do now is get in front of this and get
years from now. they are saying rough period in the beginning but now its hunky dory and it s great. but you have got so many people getting thrown off of their insurance plan and they are in a huge limbo right now and they are angry because the president looked them straight in thite and said if you like your healthcare plan you will keep it period. last night he stepped in front of the podium and said if you like your plan before 2010 when this plan gets enacted you are probably okay, you will be grandfathered in. if not, all belts are basically off. somebody should have told him when he made a statement like that. he talked about grandfathering in policies. if history is a guide here. social security and medicare were met with substantial resistance when they first started out and they became popular. having said that. prohibition started out as not very popular and was taken down
if you have a plan before the law is passed march 23, 2010, or even a plan all the way up to the end of this year that you can keep it, wouldn t that solve a lot of problems and reassure many americans that they can have affordable health care? senator alexander, when we read the regulation back in 2010, that is exactly what we did. we grandfathered in existing plans. both of the employer market and individual market. there was a lot of back and forth about that regulation. so that is why we delayed it until basically the plans could be grandfathered over this period of time and we allowed the grandfathering to continue as long as it did not reduce benefits significantly, there were some things in place. we do put in step the ability to
knew. the question is whether the president knew. but that leads to the question, matt, if the white house aides knew and political appointees and aides said keep the messaging. it doesn t sound good to put qualifiers in it and sebelius changed the regs after the law passed to cut out the grandfathering and they didn t tell the president doesn t he have to answer for that, too? yes. this is a difficult position he s put in. they are answering for it every day. jay carney is getting questions. you heard the president today. did he come close to ak knowledging what he put the american people through he and everyone who voted for this law bes based on a deception. i reject that premise and so would he. he would say, look, in retrospect i wish i had said it differently. i wish i had said if you have good health care coverage you can keep it. if you have lousy please. i don t understand how it is