Jon Cohn has the interview, which should be read in full. The most important bit is probably her articulation of what she'll hold firm to during Congressional negotiations:
If Congress votes for a plan, it may look a lot different from the one you just unveiled. So you'll have to negotiate with them. Can you give me two or three core principles that you'd take into those negotiations?
First, we have to remain committed to the goal of quality affordable care for everyone. If you don't have that as a core principle, you'll never get there. That has to be one of those principles that we'd take in to whatever the negotiations are. There are a lot of ways of getting there. Working to lower costs, and being able to improve quality by the changes we make with respect to prevention and chronic care management, will meet a second goal, which is that it has to be affordable. We're going to have a system to include everybody, but it's going to be affordable for everybody.
Those are really principles you have to be willing to stick with, because there are a lot of details that we can work out with negotiation and compromise, but at the end of the day, we want to get to quality affordable health care for everybody. The details can be negotiated and there can be a lot of legislative give and take, because there are a lot of good ideas out there. But at the end of whatever the process is, that has to be the outcome.
For related thoughts on this topic, folks should check out the Progressive Bottom Lines roundtable I hosted last year.
