as you heard, congressman collins about office hours in buffalo. let moo he ask you about office hours in downtown springfield, massachusetts. it sounds to me from listening to congressman collins he is talking about revising obamacare more than repealing and ruining obamacare. what is your view on what needs to be done to obamacare? here is the problem. why wouldn t they treat obamacare the way we treated george bush s prescription d benefit plan? if you recall, we opposed president bush s plan, largely because of what was known as the doughnut hole. that ments you had to spend out x number of dollars before the benefit kicked in. we won the house. we won the senate. we won the presidency. and quickly we closed the dough net howl and moved on. prescription d, part d of medicare, is now an accept will entitlement and no effort made to repeal it. instead we improved it. i think here there was that opportunity but they have used
more expensive are plans that are going to actually provide health care and while susan s right, that the first word is affordable, the second word is care and getting great care is essential to making this plan work, and i think the other thing, too, is looking at how many places again where states did not choose to do their own health insurance plans and exchanges and are relying on the federal government. so that plays into here, as well. susan, the associated press has a very interesting article out today. they make the sort of historical case about the president s healthcare law. they say if you look back in history at some of these big, broad programs like social security, medicare and medicaid. medicare prescription d which, of course, we ve spent a lot of time talking about, these rollouts have been rocky as well, essentially arguing when history looks back at this, it could see this ultimately as
disunited on this is a problem. but you also have problems, senator kelly ayotte among them, one voice i read yesterday, saying why are we not focused on the tried-and-true kerps, broader entitlement reform. that should be the conservative position. there is a view out there, this is i think something that has been building really since the bailout of 2009. which is that this was so, actually it goes back furth to prescription d under medicare. where conservatives said look, this is how we lost our way. we allowed government it take on more and more and more. and one of the policy questions, and it s not something that people signing up are going to feel. is ultimately do employers, big employers get out of the insurance game? we don t know, are they going to say to their employees head into the exchange, let s let government run this? the single most important thing in the obama second term is implementation of health care. exactly.