who led the health care reform effort for president obama as director of the white house office of health reform. don t call her health care czar. you re not a czar. right. but you did head the office and are now a guest scholar at brookings institute. the first question i have is i don t understand what is going on here. why are premiums going up? we were told they would go down. we don t know what is going to happen with premiums. insurance companies set the premiums and i think the secretary said this week that it s really speculative to guess what they re going to do. i ll tell you though they are going to be faced with potentially 30 million new people to insure and i think they would be crazy to raise premiums on a population like that. it s going to be a land grab i think. insurers will be eager to get into this market and cover these new people. plus, jake, we re already doing so many things and seeing some real progress on lowering costs. that s what the president saw as
leaving denver shortly headed back here to washington. s been out west the past three days. tonight on special report we ll tell you what he did today in the colorado capital. denver of course was the site of the president s nominating convention back in 2008, but his approval ratings in that state now are down. ed henry will have the story. carl cameron will look at the republican presidential contenders and their push for funds, this comes as the deadline for third quarter fund raising approaches. the first task of texas governor rick perry s ability to get big money and brit hume will have the analysis on the effect of polls on this race. new concern tonight the power of president obama s health care reform effort will explain and on the grapevine donors say the end of class warfare has to end now. and specially report from washington starts at six, now, back to new york and my colleagues at the fox. she was walking down the straight, singing diddy dumb,
exactly the same needs as massachusetts or california or north dakota. we believe in that flexibility. so right now under the law, under the affordable care act, massachusetts and utah already operate exchanges of their own that are very different. operate them in their own way and we made sure that the law allowed that. in addition to making things a little bit more politically painful, if you will, for mitt romney, by mentioning his own health care reform effort in massachusetts, something that potential republican rivals in 2012 are planning to make a lot of, the president made a substantive point there. when you decode that message what he was saying is that the health care law nationally had this provision and that in 2017 individual states could basically opt out of the president s health plan. if they came up with their own innovative ways to keep health
gregg: families u.s.a. the group that promoted the bill says the presentation, many people don t just believe that health care reform will help. here is the quote. presentation concedes that the fiscal and economic arguments that was the white house most aggressive sales pitch have essentially failed. final page of don ts counsel claims that it will against claiming the law will reduce costs and deficits. is this admonition that americans were deceived? i don t know i wouldn t go that far. i think it s an acknowledgement that democrats have not successfully sold the lay and previously the bill. as you know, all last year they were trying to tie the health care reform effort to the economy because, hey, that is number one issue that people care about. they tried and they weren t
instead, what he was saying was, look, we ve got, you know, to agree on some reasonable new rules of the road and stop standing in my way, he said. get on board. it s time for reform. that was his pitch. and they re very confident at the white house that they re pretty close to a deal here, tony. what is the president looking for here politically? is he looking for a vote out of the senate? is he looking for 61-62 margin, in that neighborhood, or something more? they re hopeful this is going to pass by a wide margin. look at the traffic record over the last 15, 16 months. from the white house perspective they believe that every turn the republicans have tried to block the health care reform effort, in large part voted against the stimulus at the beginning in the first 100 days. but they think in this case that while republicans have been putting up this fight by saying this is going to wind up leading to more government bailouts and what not which the president rejected again in hi