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Obama Comments On Health Care Exchanges

Aired October 01, 2013 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: The president will mention them, single them out, explain some of the positive elements of this new national health care reform law. Today is the first day people can sign up for it. It actually goes into effect January 1st. The president, no doubt, will make the case why this is so important. At the same time, the president, no doubt, will rail against Republicans, especially House Republicans. He will blame them for the government shutdown, this partial government shutdown that has gone into effect today, today being the first day of this shutdown.

Here comes the president right now. We'll listen and hear what he has to say. He's joined by Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Good morning, everybody.

At midnight last night, for the first time in 17 years, Republicans in Congress chose to shut down the federal government. Let me be more specific. One faction of one party in one House of Congress in one branch of government shut down major parts of the government, all because they didn't like one law.

This Republican shutdown did not have to happen, but I want every American to understand why it did happen. Republicans in the House of Representative refused to fund the government unless we defunded or dismantled the Affordable Care Act.

OBAMA: They've shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. In other words, they demanded ransom just for doing their job. And many representatives, including an increasing number of Republicans, have made it clear, had they been allowed by Speaker Boehner to take a simple up or down vote on keeping the government open, with no partisan strings attached, enough votes from both parties would have kept the American people's government open and operating.

We may not know the full impact of this Republican shut down for sometime. It will depend on how long it lasts. But, we do know a couple of things. We know the last time Republicans shut down the government in 1996, it hurt our economy. And unlike 1996, our economy is still recovering from the worst recession in generations.

We know that certain services and benefits Americans senior, veterans, business owners depend on must be put on hold. Certain offices, along with every national park and monument must be closed. And while last night I signed legislation to make sure our 1.4 active duty military are paid through the shutdown, hundreds of thousands of civilian workers, many still on the job, many forced to stay home aren't being paid, even if they have families to support and local businesses that rely on them.

OBAMA: And we know the longer this shutdown continues, the worst the effects will be. More families will be hurt. More businesses will be harmed so once again I urge House Republicans to reopen the government. Restart the services Americans depend on and allow public servants who have been sent home to return to work. It is only going to happen when Republicans realize they don't get to hold the entire economy hostage over ideological demands.

As I've said repeatedly, I am prepared to work with Democrats and Republicans to do the things we need to do -- to grow the economy and create jobs and get our fiscal house in order over the long run -- although I should add, this shutdown isn't about deficits or spending or budgets. After all, our deficits are falling at the fastest pace in 50 years. We've cut them in half since I took office.

In fact, many of the demands the Republicans are now making would actually raise our deficits.

No, this shutdown is not about deficits, it's not about budgets. This shutdown is about rolling back our efforts to provide health insurance to folks who don't have it. It's all about rolling back the Affordable Care Act. This more than anything else seems to be what the Republican Party stands for these days. I know it's strange that one party would make keeping people uninsured the centerpiece of their agenda, but that apparently is what it is.

And, of course, what's stranger still is that shutting down our government doesn't accomplish their stated goal. The Affordable Care Act is a law that passed the House, it passed the Senate. The Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. It was a central issue in last year's election. It is settled, and it is here to stay.

OBAMA: And because of its funding sources, it's not impacted by a government shutdown. And these Americans are here with me today because even though the government is closed, a big part of the Affordable Care Act is now open for business. And for them and millions like them, this is a historic day for a good reason. It's been a long time coming, but today, Americans who have been forced to go without insurance can now visit healthcare.gov and enroll in affordable new plans that offer quality coverage. That starts today. And people will have six months to sign up. So for the next six months, people are gonna have the opportunity many -- in many cases for the first time in their lives to get affordable coverage that they desperately need.

Now, of course, if you're one of the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, you don't need to do a thing. You're already benefiting from new benefits and protections that have been in place for some time under this law.

But for the 15 percent of Americans who don't have health insurance, this opportunity is life changing.

Let me just tell folks a few stories that are represented here today. A few years ago, Amanda Barret (ph) left her job in New York to take care of her parents. And for a while she had temporary insurance that covered her multiple sclerosis. But when it expired, many insurers wouldn't cover her because of her M.S. She ended up paying $1,200 a month. That's nowhere near affordable. So starting today, she can get coverage for much less because today's new plan can't use your medical history to charge you more than anybody else.

Sky-high premiums once forced Nancy Beagal (ph) to choose between paying her rent or paying for her health insurance. She's been uninsured ever since. So she pays all of her medical bills out of pocket, puts some on her credit card, making them even harder to pay. Nancy (ph) says, "They talk about those who fall through the cracks. I fell through the cracks 10 years ago, and I've been stuck there ever since." Well, starting today Nancy (ph) can get coverage just like everybody else.

OBAMA: Trenase Edwards (ph) was laid off from her job a year ago today. Six months ago she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She couldn't afford insurance on the individual market, so she hasn't received treatment yet. Her daughter, Lanace (ph), a student at the University of Maryland is considering dropping out of school to help pay her mom's bills. Starting today, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Trenace (ph) can get covered without forcing her daughter to give up on her dreams.

So if these stories of hard-working Americans sound familiar to you, well, starting today you and your friends and your family and your coworkers can get covered, too. Just visit healthcare.gov and there you can compare insurance plans side by side the same way you'd shop for a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon.

You enter some basic information. You'll be presented with a list of quality, affordable plans that are available in your area, with clear descriptions of what each plan covers and what it will cost. You'll find more choices, more competition, and in many cases, lower prices. Most uninsured Americans will find that they can get covered for $100 or less.

And you don't have to take my word for it. You can go on the website, healthcare.gov, check it out for yourself. And then show it to your family and your friends and help them get coverage, just like mayors and churches and community groups and companies are already fanning out to do across the country.

And there's a hotline where you can apply over the phone and get help with the application, or just get questions that you have answered by real people in 150 different languages. So let me give you that number. The number is 1-800-318-2596; 1-800-318-2596. Check our healthcare.gov. Call that number. Show your family and friends how to use it. And we can get America covered once and for all so that the struggles that these folks have gone through and millions around the country have gone through for years finally get addressed.

Let me just remind people why I think this is so important. I heard a striking statistic yesterday: If you get cancer, you are 70 percent more likely to live another five years if you have insurance than if you don't.

Think about that. That is what it means to have health insurance.

Set aside the issues of security and finances and how you're impacted by that, the stress involved in not knowing whether or not you're gonna have health care. This is life or death stuff.

Tens of thousands of Americans die each year just because they don't have health insurance. Millions more live with the fear that they'll go broke if they get sick.

And today we begin to free millions of our fellow Americans from that fear.

Already, millions of young adults have been able to stay on their parents' plans until they turn 26. Millions of seniors already have gotten a discount on their prescription medicines. Already, millions of families have actually received rebates from insurance companies that didn't spend enough on their health care.

This law means more choice, more competition, lower costs for millions of Americans. And this law doesn't just mean economic security for our families; it means we're finally addressing the biggest drivers of our long-term deficits. It means a stronger economy.

Remember, most Republicans have made a whole bunch of predictions about this law that haven't come true. There are no death panels. Costs haven't skyrocketed, they're growing at the slowest rate in 50 years.

The last three years, since I signed the Affordable Care Act into law are the three slowest rates of health spending growth on record.

And, contrary to Republican claims, this law hasn't destroyed our economy. Over the past three and a half years, our businesses have created 7.5 million new jobs.

Just today, we learned that our manufacturers are growing at the fastest rate in two and a half years. They have factored in Affordable Care Act. They don't think it's a problem. What's weighing on the economy isn't the Affordable Care Act, but the constant series of crisis and unwillingness to pass a reasonable budget by a faction of the Republican party.

Now like every new law, every new product roll out, there are going to be some glitches in the sign up process along the way that we will fix. I've been saying this from the start. For example, we found out there have been times this morning where the site has been running more slowly than it normally will. The reason because more than 1 million people visited healthcare.gov before 7:00 a.m. in the morning.

To put that in context, there were five times more users in the marketplace this morning than have ever been on medicare.gov at one time. That gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans around the country.

That's a good thing.

We're going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected. Consider that just a couple weeks ago Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system. And within days they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn't. That's not how we do things in America. We don't actively root for failure. We get to work, make things happen, make them better.

We keep going.

So in that context I'll work with anybody whose got a serious idea to make the Affordable Care Act work better. I've said that repeatedly. As long as I'm president I won't give in to reckless demands by some in the Republican Party to deny affordable health insurance to millions of hard-working Americans.

I want Republicans in Congress to know, these are the Americans you'd hurt if you were allowed to dismantle this law, Americans like Amanda (ph) and Nancy (ph) and Trenaise (ph), who now finally have the opportunity for basic security and peace of mind of health care just like everybody else, including Congress. The notion that you'd -- you'd make a condition for reopening the government that I make sure these folks don't have health care, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense.

Now, let me make one closing point. This Republican shutdown threatens our economy at a time when millions of Americans are still looking for work and businesses are starting to get some traction. So the timing is not good. Of course, a lot of the Republicans in the House ran for office two years ago promising to shut down the government, and so apparently they've now gotten their wish.

But as I've said before, the irony that the House Republicans have to contend with is, they've shut down a whole bunch of parts of the government but the Affordable Care Act is still open for business. And this may be why you've got many Republican governors and senators and even a growing number of reasonable Republican congressmen who are telling the extreme right of their party to, 'Knock it off, pass a budget, move on.'

And I want to underscore the fact that Congress doesn't just have to end this shutdown and reopen the government. Congress generally has to stop governing by crisis. They have to break this habit. It is a drag on the economy. It is not worthy of this country. For example, one of the most important things Congress has to do in the next couple weeks is to raise what's called the debt ceiling. And it's important to understand what this is. This is a routine vote. Congress has taken this vote 45 times to raise the debt ceiling since Ronald Reagan took office. It does not cost taxpayers a single dime, it does not grow our deficits by a single dime, it does not authorize anybody to spend any new money whatsoever. All it does is authorize the Treasury to pay the bills on what Congress has already spent.

Think about that. If you buy a car and you've got a car note, you do not save money by not paying your car note. You're just a deadbeat. If you buy a house, you don't save money by not authorizing yourself to pay the mortgage. You're just going to be foreclosed on your home.

That's what this is about. It is routine. It is what they're supposed to do. This is not a concession to me. It is not some demand that's unreasonable that I'm making. This is what Congress is supposed to do as a routine matter.

And they shouldn't wait until the last minute to do it. The last time Republicans even threatened this course of action, many of you remember back in 2011, our economy staggered, our credit rating was downgraded for the first time. If they go through with it this time and force the United States to default on its obligations for the first time in history, it would be far more dangerous than a government shutdown, as bad as a shutdown is. It would be an economic shutdown.

So I'll speak more on this in the coming days, but let me repeat, I will not negotiate over Congress' responsibility to pay bills it's already racked up. I'm not going to allow anybody to drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud just to refight a settled election or extract ideological demands. Nobody gets to hurt our economy and millions of hard-working families over a law you don't like.

There are a whole bunch of things that I'd like to see passed through Congress that the House Republicans haven't passed yet. And I'm not out there saying, well I'm going to let America default unless Congress does something that they don't want to do. That's not how adults operate. Certainly that's not how our government should operate.

And that's true whether there's a Democrat in this office or a Republican in this office. It doesn't matter whether it's a Democratic House of Representatives or a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. There are certain rules that everybody abides by because we don't want to hurt other people just because we have a political disagreement.

So my basic message to Congress is this, pass a budget. End the government shutdown. Pay your bills. Prevent an economic shutdown. Don't wait. Don't delay. Don't put our economy or our people through this any longer. I am more than happy to work with them. Work on the things that the American people sent us here to work on, creating new jobs, new growth, new security for our middle class. We're better than this. Certainly the American people are a lot better than this. And I believe that what we've accomplished for Amanda and Nancy and Trenaise (ph) and tens of millions of their fellow citizens on this day proves that even when the odds are long and the obstacles are many, we are and always will be a country that can doing great things together.

Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. Thank you, all of you, for the great work that you're doing. And thank you, Kathleen Sibelius, for the outstanding work that she's doing making sure that millions of Americans can get health insurance. Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, if you won't negotiate, how can you get a solution? How can you bring an end to this if you won't talk to the congressional leaders?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How about a House/Senate conference, Mr. President? Wouldn't a House/Senate conference help?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any (INAUDIBLE) the World War II vets?

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: All right, you hear reporters shouting questions at the president. He's clearly not going to answer those questions. He's taking his guests back into the Oval Office over there at the West Wing of the White House from the Rose Garden.

The president making a strong statement, as we all anticipated, not only speaking of the great benefits from his perspective of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare as it's called, which goes into effect in so many areas today, the first day that people can start signing up for the Affordable Care Act, but also railing against Republicans, blaming them directly for this government shutdown and warning them if they try to attach any conditions whatsoever to raising the nation's debt ceiling by October 17th, that's when the Treasury Department says the U.S. will run out of money, won't be able to repay its debts, he is not going to negotiate. I will not negotiate with Congress, he says, on raising the debt ceiling.

Gloria Borger's here and Newt Gingrich, the former speaker is here as well.

Gloria, the president's got excellent points that he makes there. The problem is, right now he's not really discussing these behind the scenes with the House Republicans in order to end this government shutdown. That -- those are the people he really has to speak to.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. And it's -

BLITZER: Invite them over to the White House and get down to some real negotiations.

BORGER: As you know, yesterday, he did call - he did call congressional leaders, Republican, Democratic.

BLITZER: But it's one thing to make a phone call saying, you know, let's talk. BORGER: Right, he didn't -

BLITZER: It's another thing, come on over. If you're the speaker of the House and the president of the United States says come over to the Oval Office, we need to talk -

BORGER: Right.

BLITZER: The speaker will come over.

BORGER: Well, in the days when Newt Gingrich was speaker, the speaker actually might have spoken for the caucus. I think at this particular time, you have a speaker in John Boehner with a very divided caucus. So if he goes down to talk to the White House and he says, and correct me if I'm wrong, if he says, look, you know, I've got a divided caucus and I don't think he can deliver and sort of say, OK, we're all going to do this and we're going to sign on to this, because his caucus is so - is so split.

BLITZER: Go ahead, Newt.

NEWT GINGRICH, HOST, CNN'S "CROSSFIRE": I just - I just think this has been a standard White House ploy that is nonsense. There is - there is --

BLITZER: What, the whole event? That was a 20-minute address he made --

GINGRICH: There's a - there is a - there's a speaker of the House. OK. It is a complicated, muddled situation. But there's a speaker of the House.

BORGER: Right.

GINGRICH: OK. And the fact is, he's the person who can schedule who's ever going to get scheduled. Now, if the president - if the president had been serious, they would have been meeting all morning and he would have come out and said we had a good meeting, we're still working on a lot of things, hope to get it done. This was a purely partisan campaign speech. The fact that he says, I will not negotiate, who is he to say that? What about the Constitution? What do you mean you won't negotiate? We have routinely had things added to the debt ceiling since Dwight Eisenhower, routinely. Now, for the president to suddenly announce a rule new, the Obama rule, Congress is beneath my worry about (ph). I'll talk to the Russians, I'll talk to the Iranians, I'll meet with the Israelis, but Republican congressmen, they're beneath my contempt (ph).

BORGER: Look, as you know, the White House point here is, what are the so-called concessions the president could give, the full faith and credit of the United States or keeping the government open?

GINGRICH: He could do a hundred (ph) things.

BORGER: I mean that's not his to give. I mean what is the negotiation? GINGRICH: Of course it is. He could say - he could say I'll sign the Keystone Pipeline. I'll sign the repeal of the tax on medical devices. I will work with you on six other things. I mean there are lots -- first of all, they don't even know because they don't sit down in a room and say, what can we give? They sit in a room and say how can I write another offensive partisan speech proving that I don't want to talk to anybody.

BORGER: Well, I - look, I mean I think there's a way to get an agenda scheduled and to talk about legislation as opposed to attaching things to a debt ceiling. I think that's --

GINGRICH: But he won't even do that.

BLITZER: Right. Right.

BORGER: I think - and attach -

GINGRICH: But he doesn't even do that.

BLITZER: Hold your thoughts a little bit because we have a lot more to digest. A lot more to assess. This subject is obviously not going away. Politics and the people, national parks, monuments, memorials, off limits today, closed for business. Will the government shutdown have a real effect on the next election? S.E. Cupp, Van Jones, they are here, as well. They're getting ready to debate. Lots more news coming up right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: We're now more than 13 hours into day one of the government shutdown. All eyes are on Congress as they go back and forth with various spending proposals. But even with a flurry of activity, still no deal in sight, and that means almost 800,000 federal workers are being sent home without pay.

Here's the cost. Among other things, the shutdown means a loss of about $200 million a day to an already troubled economy. That's about the same amount we spend in Afghanistan every single day. In a week, the loss could be $1 billion. That's half the cost of rebuilding Moore, Oklahoma, after the deadly tornado there in May.

We just heard from President Obama and we've also heard from members of Congress as they dig in their heels.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HARRY REID (D), MAJORITY LEADER: We have a good day for the anarchists. Why? Because the government is closed. Speaker Boehner and his band of Tea Party radicals have done the unthinkable. They've shut down the federal government.

SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R), TEXAS: And since when is it beyond the power of the United States Congress to change existing law by amending it or repealing it or defunding it? It's absolutely unprecedented to have a majority leader of the United States Senate, someone who knows this institution as well as anyone, to say that Congress is powerless to act.

REP. PETE DEFAZIO (D), OREGON: Those people know that if they act reasonably here, that they will get an ultra right wing nut case Tea Party primary challenge funded by the likes of the Koch (ph) brothers and others. Very, very generously funded. So they've even managed not only to take the government hostage, but to intimidate their own truly conservative members, those who aren't Cruz-ite anarchist radical libertarians.

REP. MARK POCAN (D), WISCONSIN: The best I can say is, I feel like I'm serving in the nation's largest kindergarten, only we're in charge of the federal checkbook and the nuclear arsenal.

REP. STEVE PEARCE (R), NEW MEXICO: I call on the speaker, the president, and Mr. Reid to gather publicly in front of TV cameras and work the differences out.

REP. AMI BERA (D), CALIFORNIA: This is not an episode of "The West Wing." This is real life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: A game of political chicken. Congressional ping-pong. The blame game. Whatever you want to call it, the shutdown is here and we are now deep into day one.

But while the politicians duke it out up on Capitol Hill, the federal workers and a lot of other American people who really become the pawns in what is going on. Let's discuss what's going on with two of the co- hosts of CNN's new "Crossfire."