Obama and his advisorsObama is meeting with his cabinet this weekend, and this morning on the Meet the Press roundtable, Harold Ford suggested that part of their meeting will include coming up with strategies to combat the trolls, uh, I mean the republicans who are merely trying to derail reform --to kill the bill, as Ford says.
In this interview, Valerie Jarrett says Obama won't be derailed.
AL HUNT: Welcome back. We continue our look at health care with the president’s top aide and confidant, Valerie Jarrett. Valerie, let me ask you this - Congress missed the president’s deadline of August to pass both measures to both houses, Senate Finance Committee seems deadlocked, lobbyists are going to be out in full force in August. Are you worried that this thing may be slipping away?
VALERIE JARRETT: No not at all. We have a great deal of confidence that we’re going to have health-care reform passed this year. If you look at how far we’ve come, we’ve come further in health-care reform this year than we probably have in the last 50 years.
There are ample areas where there’s a great deal of agreement and I think we’re at that home stretch and it was important that the president set a deadline, it added some discipline to the process, and we’re confident that we’ll see it come to fruition in the fall.
HUNT: What will he do in the next couple weeks? What will be his message the next few weeks? What new message will he put out there?
JARRETT: Well, the message will be the message that he has been taking to the American people since this began; he laid forth a framework for why we needed this, why it was so urgent to have them right now. We have to reduce costs; we have to make sure that it is affordable. We have to make sure that if you lose your job you don’t have to worry about health care. If you have a pre-existing condition you don’t have to worry about health care.
We have to make sure that we’re really focusing on outcomes and that we’re looking towards making people healthier. The basic parameters that the president set forth are the ones to which there’s a great deal of consensus, not just in Congress, but if you look at it this is the first time we’ve been able to have AARP and the pharmaceutical industry and the physicians and the nurses -
HUNT: But not the insurance industry.
JARRETT: - one cross-section of support. We’re working on them. A lot of the insurance companies are coming along as well.
HUNT: The president expressed his frustration in the Time magazine interview with the critics and in his speech this week he said he was sick and tired of some of this criticism. Is this getting to him?
JARRETT: No, not at all. Listen, there is no one more resilient, more tenacious and more committed to this issue of health-care reform than the president.
The economy is fragile, if you think about what happened in the last six months, the president really was able to rescue the economy, bring it back from the precipice of disaster, and now we’re working on rebuilding it. So as people are trying to focus on making ends meet, feeding their family, paying for college tuition; health care is the single biggest challenge that we face.
HUNT: He’s done that and yet the Pew Poll shows that support for his agenda; health care and his handling of the economy, he slipped rather dramatically in the polls. Why is that?
Jarrett answers the poll question and also talks about CEO pay. Read the rest at Bloomberg.
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