seen is in my state where we had less problems, we had 12,000 people get on there and thousands and thousands of open accounts. we had hundreds of small businesses open accounts. % are getting through. i think some of the states are seeing different experiences. there should be a focus on that and there should be a focus on the rates and some of the offerings for people who otherwise either couldn t get insurance or were getting insurance that costs more. this gives them options they department have. the competitive market place will work as long as we make the access work so people will be able to have the access. there has to be a focus on it because you have to get people to sign up. i don t think that s a bad thing. as far as the budget negotiations, they made clear what the focus here is on is sequestration cuts. what can we do and how can we keep the deficit going down? doing it in a balanced way. real quick, i want to ask
come from, seriously? richard, after two weeks of this but better to kick that can one more times than do what republicans would have us do, which was shred it into little pieces and eat it. i am just amused the can is up here in new york. yes, and we can expect to kick the can in january, if they can just manage to do it a couple of times without shutting down the government, i think it is the best case we can go for. they re going to come up with a grand bargain where they agree to replace the sequestration cuts we got in 2011, with a more sensible way of fixing the budget term. they wouldn t reach the agreement on that. the president and democrats say you have to have a tax increase as part of the deal benjamin netanyahu told me a fascinating thing when i interviewed him a couple of weeks ago. don t laugh.
mid-january, that is when the new round of sequestration cuts are supposed to take effect. we ll probably see a lot more scare stories out of the administration. we ll talk about exchanging changing some of those cuts for different cuts, we ll hear about the defense department, the whole fight will go on. bill: the focus goes back on obamacare to some degree and also the spending. you believe sequestration the next time around will be the big battle. you know what democrats will do? want that spending put back into the budget. republicans will say no. who wins? well there are two things that republicans want here. one, they do want more spending for defense defense and two, they would be happy to exchange discretionary cuts for longer term reforms in entitlement. the president agreed to some of that stuff. maybe that he can come to agreement. my sense we ll probably have little tiny movements on either side. on obamacare, what we played
so you won t see this date is very important, but i think that mid-january date is equally as important. so the hope would be we can take a balanced approach where we replace some of these sequestration cuts, which in mid-january you re going to see over $20 billion in additional cuts with other things. revenue. i could be on for an hour telling you ideas there as well as maybe some reform. what kind of revenue? what kind of taxes? i would throw out that you could get rid of some of the subsidies out there. ethanol subsidies have gone away. oil is at 40 billion right now. you could have a negotiation of prices under medicare part d. that brings in over $200 billion in revenue. home mortgage deduction, very important in our country. you could set it at $500,000 in value on a home and still if you buy a $1 million home, you get it up to that $500,000 value. that brings in tens of billions of dollars. there are many things we could
i couldn t agree more with what he just said. the one thing i would add, as you look at the deal as it s emerging, we re going to get back together in december, groundhog day again, what i m fearful is it s not just kicking the can down the road, it s going to go backwards. what is going to happen in december? my fear is we re going to undo a lot of the sequestration cuts. so adam, why was this a good idea? trying to stop obama care? no, no, i don t want to argue the merits of obama care right now. i understand you feel strongly and there s another place and time for that. i m talking about this specific strategy, tying the defunding of obama care to the funding of the government, and then how it went on from there. house republicans and senate democrats not being able to reach any sort of compromise. if you could go back in time, do you think there would be a way to do this more effectively? you have to keep this fight up. obama care is going to cost $2 trillion over the nex