Axelrod: Health care now, jobs next

by Mark Silva

As America's best writer once said of premature reports of his own death, the White House suggests that writing off health-care reform now would be "a tragic outcome.''

"It would be a tragic, tragic outcome,'' David Axelrod, the president's senior political adviser, said in an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe today, appearing along with Ed Schultz of the network's evening liberal-prime-time and GOP strategist and former presidential adviser Mark McKinnon -- who congratulated Axelrod and his team on winning "the keys to the gates of Hell.''

"We're on the verge of something that would make an enormously positive difference for people,'' Axelrod said. "I guess if you're hale and hearty and you have insurance, it's fine to say, kill this bill...But if you're a person with a preexisting medical condition or if you're a small business person and you can't get insurance for your employees, or if you're someone in the single market, in other words, not through your employer and you're paying a huge premium to get insurance now or you can't afford it, I don't think that you want this moment to pass.

"It will not come back again,'' Axelrod said of the moment at hand on Capitol Hill -- a message that President Barack Obama also has been attempting to underscore: That, after "generations" of attempts to overhaul the delivery of health care in the United States, Congress is now at what the president called a "precipice.''

Yet, as the White House concedes to the Senate's imperative of keeping 60 votes in line for the bill -- bowing to Sen. Joe Lieberman's refusal to support a plan that offered a nonprofit alternative to a "public option'' and opened a Medicare "buy-in'' to people 55 and older -- some are complaining that the bill is losing any real reform value.

Joe Lieberman, is he writing this bill?

"He's certainly not writing this bill,'' Axelrod said of Lieberman. "But the notion that we would let our personal feelings about one person defeat a bill that would deliver to people who don't have insurance -- the opportunity to get it at a price they can afford, that would defeat a bill, that has patient protections that we fought for, for decades for people who do have insurance.

"To defeat a bill that will bend the curve on this inexorable rise in health care costs is insane. It shouldn't be about Joe Lieberman. It should be about people who need help. It should be about the American people. And that's what we're fighting for.''

McKinnon (a former adviser to former President George W. Bush who refrained from advising the Republican candidate for president last year because he didn't want to take part in an inevitable trashing of the Democratic candidate, Obama) posed this question to the president's political adviser:

"I know from a policy point of view you want this bill passed. It's also important as a legislative accomplishment for the year. Presuming you get that done, can you talk for a second about what the top legislative priority will be for next year.

"Well, obviously, Mark, I think our focus is and has to be on jobs,'' Axelrod said. "And we are working through a series of -- we've stopped the deluge of job losses, 750,000 jobs a month at the beginning of the year when you gave us the keys to the gates of Hell, down to a trickle right now. And we believe that it's going to turn soon, and we're going to have positive job growth.''

See the transcript, courtesy of MSNBC, here in the Swamp:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Calling in from the White House right now, Senior Advisor David Axelrod.

And David has told me -- David, I hear the same thing from conservatives that our guests are too skewed to the left. We have Ed Schultz and Arianna Huffington and Howard Dean. So we brought on Mark McKinnon to make you feel better.

(CROSSTALK)

How's that for you, David?

DAVID AXELROD, WHITE HOUSE SENIOR ADVISOR (via telephone): These are all friends of mine, man.

SCARBOROUGH: So, David, you've been listening this morning. Bill Burton and other guys at the White House have been listening.

What's your response to progressives who say kill this bill now?

SCARBOROUGH: I think it would be a tragic, tragic outcome. We're on the verge of something that would make an enormously positive difference for people. And it is -- I guess if you're hale and hearty and you have insurance, it's fine to say, kill this bill. Or if you have a good relationship -- you're healthy and you have a good relationship with your insurance company.

But if you're a person with a preexisting medical condition or if you're a small business person and you can't get insurance for your employees, or if you're someone in the single market, in other words, not through your employer and you're paying a huge premium to get insurance now or you can't afford it, I don't think that you want this moment to pass. It will not come back again.

You know, I'm a little bewildered that some of my friends -suggest that this is somehow a win for the insurance industry when every single day we're battling the insurance industry whose spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to defeat this bill.

SCARBOROUGH: Mika.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, CO-HOST: Well, David, let me ask you about that because I'd like you to characterize, if you could, the White House reaction to Howard Dean's criticism, which has been extremely pointed and sharp at this plan. And he says he tried. He tried to go to the White House privately and behind the scenes to talk about this, to talk about his concerns and has no choice but to lay this all out on the public stage.

BRZEZINSKI: To his criticism, you say what?

AXELROD: Well, what I say first of all is that I have a lot of respect for Governor Dean, but he got on the phone with Nancy-Ann DeParle, our point person on the health care issue, went through point by point. She explained why he was wrong. And he simply didn't want to hear that critique.

I saw his piece "Post" this morning, and it is predicated on a bunch of erroneous conclusions.

SCARBOROUGH: Give me an examples. What is the -- how is Howard Dean wrong?

AXELROD: Well, let's go through the meat paragraph of his critique.

He said, "This legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans."

The fact is, in many states, they charge five times as much today, and this would help reduce that disparity. They believe that they can charge more because there are greater expenses associated with caring for older Americans.

But this at least shrinks that ban down for many people in many states.
It does create -- we create the health exchange for people who don't have insurance so that they can go in and they can have choices, and they will have choices and there will be competition within these markets. And there are devices built in that will encourage that --

SCARBOROUGH: Ed Schultz, that sounds pretty good. There's some good things in this bill, Ed Schultz.

ED SCHULTZ, HOST, "THE ED SHOW": Mr. Axelrod, that cuts right to the chase.

Progressives in this country do not believe that there is direct competition for the insurance industry. We're going to be handing private insurance 40 million customers, roughly, with taxpayer dollars, subsidizing those under $90,000 a year as it stands right now.

Where's the competition? You talk about the exchange. The exchange is going to be -- the oversight there is going to be private insurance.
The key is people in this country right now -- the progressives -- don't believe that the White House has stood up to the insurance industry.

AXELROD: Let me ask you a question. Why is the insurance industry so vigorously opposing this bill? If this is such a gift to the insurance industry, if they don't believe that this is going to force competition and force them to adhere to some standards in terms of how they treat patients -- by the way, let me add parenthetically we fought for years as progressives for a patient's bill of rights.

Everything that was in that patient's bill of rights is now enshrined in this legislation. And yet people say, let's just throw it away. We don't need it anymore. Why is the insurance industry fighting us so hard, Ed, if this bill does not assist them.

SCHULTZ: Respectfully, Mr. Axelrod, I'll answer your question if you answer mine. I'll answer your question. They have the money to play a shell game on the American people.

They're creating this facade that it's really bad for them. It's not.

It's a handout. We have had former insurance executives who have nothing to lose come on the air and explain to the American people that this is a sellout to big insurance. Big insurance, in turn, is playing a shell game on the American people saying, oh, this is such a great deal.

SCARBOROUGH: And David Axelrod, of course, right now we're hearing a lot of --

(CROSSTALK)

SCARBOROUGH: And of course you add on top of this is frustration from progressives, David, with a name that makes them all -- can I say "pissed off" on the air?

BRZEZINSKI: You can.

SCARBOROUGH: Pissed off. Joe Lieberman. I mean, you're just waving the bloody flag in front of people like poor Ed here, Keith Olbermann, Arianna Huffington.

Joe Lieberman, is he writing this bill?

AXELROD: Look -- no, he's certainly not writing this bill. But the notion that we would let our personal feelings about one person defeat a bill that would deliver to people who don't have insurance -- the opportunity to get it at a price they can afford, that would defeat a bill, that has patient protections that we fought for, for decades for people who do have insurance.

To defeat a bill that will bend the curve on this inexorable rise in health care costs is insane. It shouldn't be about Joe Lieberman. It should be about people who need help. It should be about the American people. And That's what we're fighting for.

SCARBOROUGH: Hey, David, we're going to make things easier for you. The next question will be delivered by a Republican Mark McKinnon.

MARK MCKINNON, CONTRIBUTOR, THEDAILYBEAST.COM: Hey, David, like I told you, you were getting the keys to the gates of Hell.

(CROSSTALK)

MCKINNON: I know from a policy point of view you want this bill passed. It's also important as a legislative accomplishment for the year. Presuming you get that done, can you talk for a second about what the top legislative priority will be for next year.

AXELROD: Well, obviously, Mark, I think our focus is and has to be on jobs. And we are working through a series of -- we've stopped the deluge of job losses, 750,000 jobs a month at the beginning of the year when you gave us the keys to the gates of Hell, down to a trickle right now. And we believe that it's going to turn soon, and we're going to have positive job growth.

We have to deal with the carnage that was left, 7 million people having lost their jobs during the recession, the great recession. And so we want to do some things to accelerate hiring in the private sector, to help small businesses to accelerate infrastructure projects and do things that will get people working again. But it's also going to help small businesses if they can buy health insurance at a price they can afford, which is what this bill would do.

SCARBOROUGH: Peggy Noonan.

PEGGY NOONAN, COLUMNIST, "WALL STREET JOURNAL" : David, it looks to me like -- I mean, all the polls have been saying -- not just the polls of yesterday, but last week and the week before -- that on the issue of health care, you are losing the left, you are losing the right, you are losing the center. That looks to me like a political disaster.

Are you totally misunderstood? Why are you losing the left, right, and center?

AXELROD: Well, Peggy, if you've been watching these polls, it has always been true, when you ask people the question, would you support the bill that Congress is considering on health reform, that people have been at mixed at best on passing that bill.

When you describe what's in the bill, there's strong support for it. I think there's a very complicated bill, and when Congress starts debating things you get a kind of sausage factory sense instead of what's going on and not the whole picture.

NOONAN: So did you communicate it badly?

AXELROD: When you describe the fundamental benefits that are to be derived, the patient protections, that the doughnut hole in the Medicare prescription bill will be filled in and so it'll save seniors on the average of $700 a year. When you talk about what it means for small businesses and people who don't have insurance today, people -- and when you talk about the fact that this is the biggest deficit reduction that we've seen since the Budget Act of '97, and will help bend the curve on health care spending. People say we're for it.

NOONAN: So, David, it's a great bill. But left, right, and center don't like it.

How do you put these two facts together?

AXELROD: Well, you know what, we don't think of the world in terms of left, right, and center. We think of the world in terms of small business people. We think of the world in terms of senior citizens. We think of the world in terms of Americans who are looking for help on a problem that we've been trying to solve, Peggy, for a century.

Seven presidents have tried to do this. Seven presidents have failed.
We have an opportunity to do it now. And if we don't, here's what's going to happen. Premiums are going to continue to multiply on an exponential rate. There's going to be no relief in sight. More people are going to lose their insurance. More people are going to be deprived of insurance because of preexisting conditions. And the status quo will reign. And ultimately, the whole system will implode.

SCARBOROUGH: David Axelrod, we greatly appreciate you calling in.

AXELROD: Thanks. Good to be with you guys.

BRZEZINSKI: Talk to you soon.

AXELROD: Great. We'll talk to you soon.

SCARBOROUGH: All right. Talk to you soon.