Here are the quotes I took down from his comments. Everything is on-the-fly transcription, so there may be a word or two wrong.
When everyone is covered, premiums will be more affordable. Insurance markets will work better because costs will be shared by more healthy americans. Insurance companies will be able to reduce costs because everyone will get the care they need.We've gotta do this right. We need reform in our system. Really, it's not even a system. It's a hodgepodge. We don't have a health care system. But whatever it is we do have is clearly broken. Health care costs are rising too fast for individuals and companies, if you look at the medicare portion of our budget, we have to act.Looking back at 1994, there were a few mistakes. The health care proposal was too top-down and they waited too long to offer it. And they came to Congress and basically said, this is it. It makes far more sense for Congress to have a more prominent role as the primary legislative body. Inaction is much more expensive than acting. I also will tell you that when i talk to senators, Republicans and Democrats both, we all know what needs to be done. We all know we have to move. The devil is in the details, clearly, but there's a much greater sense of momentum and movement than before.I don't think a single payer health care system makes sense in this country. We are america, we will come up with a uniquely american health care system that's a combination of public and private.We need to train more primary care doctors. I heard only 2 percent of last year's doctors were primary care, because the money wasn't there. We need more medical homes, a more holistic approach to care. There must be a greater role for primary care then there is in America today, and this bill has incentives to do that.My main goal is a holistic system where all Americans are covered. Once we have accomplished that, I think we can more easily deal with some of these individual points of reform. The time has passed for us to nickel and dime this system, to tamp down on trouble over here so it bubbles up somewhere else. The goal here is to set up a comprehensive, holistic system.i do believe we should not scrap the employer based system. We should maintain it. We should build upon it. but the current vision of the tax code has certain inefficiencies that I believe we can address while still building on the employer-based system.How long will this take? It will take time. At least three years. But some features can come in earlier, like medicaid and medicare eligibility changes.The cost of the economic bailout is not $700 billion. It's quite a bit less. I believe we have to be honest and creative in working with CBO. Mr. Orszag and I are going to have a lot of conversations about how to score some of these provisions.
