C-SPAN/NEWSMAKERS

Host: Peter Slen

Guest: Jeff Bingaman, Senator, D-New Mexico, Member of the Gang of Six

Reporters: Jeff Young, Michael Coleman

PETER SLEN, HOST, C-SPAN, NEWSMAKERS: Well, healthcare legislation continues to be a moving target, particularly in the U.S. Senate, and that’s why we’re pleased this week to have a member of the Gang of Six, Senator Jeff Bingaman, as our guest on Newsmakers. Here to question him, Jeff Young of the Hill Newspaper and Michael Coleman of the Albuquerque Journal.

Senator, I understand that you have just left a meeting of the Gang of Six. Could you give us an update on the progression of your talks?

JEFF BINGAMAN (D-MN), MEMBER OF FINANCE COMMITTEE, GANG OF SIX: Well, there’s not a lot of news to report. I do think Senator Baucus has continued to solicit input from us as to what he would include in his proposal or his mark that he has indicated he will release next week. He’s also said that the week after next, I believe on Monday of the following week, we will go ahead and mark up legislation in the Finance Committee, which I believe will at least start with the package of proposals that we’ve been talking about, and of course everyone will have a chance to propose amendments and additions, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot of that.

SLEN: Are you to the point yet where the six of you in the Gang of Six agree on a basic structure for healthcare legislation?

BINGAMAN: Well, the basic structure that the President outlined the other night – where we try to expand coverage, where we try to reform the payment system in Medicare, where we try to reform the insurance markets – that basic structure, I think, is generally agreed to as the way to proceed. There’s a lot of uncertainty about the details of that, and I don’t want to suggest that everybody has signed onto all of the details or signed onto a final package. That’s not the case. Senator Baucus is going to put this out, as I understand it, as his chairman’s mark, and then there’ll be a chance, as I say, for everyone to offer amendments to the extent that they still have concerns, and of course the full committee has not been part of a lot of these discussions, and they will have a lot of amendments, I’m sure.

SLEN: Does it hurt the Senate and the Gang of Six to be a month or so behind where the House is when it comes to healthcare legislation?

BINGAMAN: Well, I tend to think the month has been pretty well spent in the sense that we have been working on the detail of this legislation. Of course the Finance Committee has the responsibility to pay for whatever is done by way of either revenue or offsets of spending elsewhere, and that’s been a lot of the focus, and that’s a very important part of what needs to be done. The President talked about not signing a bill if it adds to the deficit and about controlling the future growth in healthcare costs down the road. Those are – those had been central focuses of our discussions, and I hope that will be reflected in the bill that Senator Baucus puts out. I’m confident it will be reflected.

SLEN: Jeff Young.

JEFFREY YOUNG, HEALTHCARE REPORTER, THE HILL: I think instead of all the other questions that I have, I’d like to ask you what is your definition of success here? What will you consider you know a good piece of legislation, a – you know a legislative victory here? What does that look like to you?

BINGAMAN: Well, I think success would consist of a major reform in healthcare system, and by that, I think it’s the elements, again, that the President talked about the other night. I think we do need to reform the insurance markets so that we don’t have companies continuing to deny coverage for preexisting conditions, continuing to refuse to sell policies to folks who they determine are sick or are likely to get sick. So that’s part of it. The expansion of coverage. We’ve gotten an awful lot of people. The statistics just came out the other day that my state of New Mexico, we are the second worst off in the country for the number of uninsured, and therefore we need to find a way to provide coverage for that group. This legislation would do that. I think that’s very important, and then the payment reforms in the federally funded programs, in Medicare, Medicaid, in order to eliminate some of the inefficiencies that exists there.

SLEN: Did you have a follow-up? Go ahead.

YOUNG: Yes, actually I did. The simplest way to put this question is you know you’ve been in those meetings. You're in the room with the two other Democrats and the three Republicans trying to figure all of this out. You know from that vantage point you know after the Friday meeting, the last meeting of this week, what is your gut feeling? Do you think you're going to get a deal?

BINGAMAN: Well, I think what we’ve got is legislation that in many respects is acceptable to all of us, and frankly I can support what I believe the Chairman is planning to put out by way of a mark. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t support some proposed improvements in it, if that opportunity arises in committee, and I think that’s probably true of all of our group in that all of us would want, perhaps, to see some changes in what the Chairman proposes. I can’t – as I said before, I can’t speak for any of the other members as to whether they would support the final package that Senator Baucus puts out. I think the real question is, at the end of the markup in the Finance Committee, do we have a bill that we are then reporting to the floor that Democrats and Republicans can support, and I hope very much that’s the case. I don’t know that that’s the case at this point.

YOUNG: It seems to me that in recent days this Gang of Six has almost at times seemed more like a Gang of Four, with Senators Enzi and Grassley kind of disavowing maybe some key parts of this. Can you actually get a bipartisan bill or support for a bipartisan bill if they're not on board with you know the basic framework or certainly key elements of the proposal?

BINGAMAN: Well, each senator, of course, makes up his or her own mind on the legislation, and I do think there are some strongly-held views by each of the group of six. So I can’t tell you that – you know I think I would like to see all of the Republicans who are participating in our discussions are able to support a final package. I don’t know if that’ll be the case or not. I think, again, we’ll probably have to wait till the end of that markup, and then they’ll look at what the Committee has finally settled on to decide. I don’t know but – that that’s going to happen, but I think that it may well.

YOUNG: Assuming you don’t get ultimately the Republican support you need to pass the bill, you were one of the first, or maybe the first of the Gang of Six to say that you would support using this controversial reconciliation budget maneuver to pass the legislation. As you know, that’s supposed to be legislation that is – effects the deficit. Yet you guys are saying this bill is going to be deficit neutral. How would that qualify if you passed – you know if you passed it with reconciliation, what might you include in a reconciliation bill?

BINGAMAN: Well, frankly, I haven’t you know sat down with the parliamentarian to try to understand what would qualify to be included in reconciliation bill and what would not. But my hope is that we are able to report a bill out of the Finance Committee that doesn’t just – isn’t just deficit neutral, but that, in fact, does reduce the deficit, and if that’s the case, then much of that legislation would presumably be – would qualify to be included in a reconciliation bill.

SLEN: Senator, you're on both the finance and the Health Committee. For you, what are the essential elements of a healthcare reform bill?

BINGAMAN: Well, I think they’re somewhat the ones I’ve described. I think we need to reform the insurance markets so that we don’t have in the future the kinds of abuse that – of individual policyholders that we’ve – that we currently suffer with.

SLEN: So like a precondition?

BINGAMAN: Yes, I think we – clearly, the President said that he supports legislation that would outlaw the issuing of policies that excludes illnesses that arise because of preexisting condition. I think that’s a good thing to do. I don’t think we should have those kinds of policies sold in this country in the future. Now, I do think the President also has made the point repeatedly, and I think it needs to be made, in that if a person’s got a policy they like right now, they can keep that. They can – they can renew that. They can add their family members to that, and we have that specified in both the HELP (ph) Committee legislation, and I believe it will be in the finance bill that we wind up passing too.

So I think that’s very important so that people’s current coverage is not jeopardized, but in the future if they want a new policy – if they want a different policy, it would have to meet certain requirements, and this preexisting conditions is one of those key. So that’s part of it. I do think it’s important that we go ahead and expand coverage to some of those folks, most of those folks who are uninsured now in order to reduce the cost shifting that is currently occurring. People who have insurance now are paying something over $1,000 a year on the average family policy to cover the medical expenses that are incurred by people without coverage, and we need to try to eliminate as much of that as we can.

SLEN: So through a public option?

BINGAMAN: Not necessarily, but I favor a public option. I voted for a public option, and I think that you know the way that the legislation is contemplated, both in the HELP (ph) Committee and in the House-passed bill and in the bill we’re working on in the Finance Committee, is that you would – you would expand coverage, and you would – you would implement these reforms. One additional way to try to bring competition to the market is to provide a public option, and that would be another seller of healthcare, of health insurance that would be – would be set up as a nonprofit. I think that would be a good thing to do, I think it would encourage competition, and I think it would help keep down the growth of premiums in the future. But even without that, there are other provisions in here that also try to accomplish those same objectives.

SLEN: If a public option is not in the finance bill or the health bill, would you support it?

BINGAMAN: Well, again you know there are a lot of important reforms that are in this overall package that I think we ought to try to get across the finish line, and I’m not one who says you know unless you do this particular thing, I won’t take the other things that you’re doing that I also support. That to me is not a – is not a very constructive position to take. So I think we should get the very best package we can. I hope we can include a public option in that, and we need to just see where the votes are as we move forward.

SLEN: Jeff Young.

YOUNG: Speaking of the public option, most democrats, of course, do support it. Even in the Senate, there’s some who don’t, and there are some others who haven’t really say it one way or the other. Do you feel as though Senator Baucus had you and all the other Finance Committee Democrats in a meeting early in the week right after the Senate returned from recess. Is you your feeling that, among Democrats on that committee, that there’s enough support within you know – among yourselves to report out the bill basically as Senator Baucus has proposed it, whether or not you get Republican votes. Some of your colleagues, as you know, came out of that meeting telling us that they had some serious problems with what – with what Baucus had proposed. What’s your read on that?

BINGAMAN: I’m not familiar with what they were alluding to, specifically that they had problems with what he was proposing. As I say, this is a multi-step process, and Senator Baucus has indicated he’s going to put out his mark, and then we have a procedure in the Committee where everybody gets to file amendments, proposed amendments that they want to call up to change what he’s proposed, and then we have the markup itself, where everybody gets to bring those amendments up and get a vote on them. So I can’t predict for you precisely where we’ll wind up at the end. I do think there’s strong sentiment on the part of the Democrats I’ve talked to on our Committee in favor of doing some type of comprehensive healthcare reform because the need is there to accomplish it, and the growth in healthcare costs absent healthcare reform is just unsustainable. I think the President tried to make that case strongly last Wednesday night.

YOUNG (?): Do you think that a healthcare reform bill, with all the other elements that you’ve described – insurance market reforms, Medicare and Medicaid, any of the reforms, all the things that we’ve talked about here – do you think a bill that looks like that that does not have a public option in it can pass the Senate?

BINGAMAN: Well, I don’t know, frankly. I don’t know if it can or not, but again, I think this is a multi-stage process, and the first stage is to get a bill out. Senator Baucus is committed to do that next week. The second stage is to do the markup of that legislation. The third stage is going to be for Senator Reid as the majority leader to decide what portions of the finance bill, if we’re able to report a bill out of finance, and what portions of that to bring to the Senator floor or what portions of the Health Committee legislation to bring to the Senate floor. He’s going to have to merge those two just as the speaker, Speaker Pelosi, is going to have to do that with the three Committees that have acted in the House, and that’s how we’ll actually get a bill on the Senate floor for consideration.

YOUNG: Senator, one of the things, as you know, Republicans have been collaborating for is Tort reform, the idea of limiting you know medical malpractice awards. President Obama seemed to kind of throw that bone out there the other night in his speech, although he was a little bit vague about it. Senator Udall, your Democratic colleague from New Mexico, has said he thinks that Tort reform should be on the table, part of the discussion. What’s your view? The Gang of Six I don’t think seems to be really doing much about that or with this. Is that going to become part of the ongoing debate?

BINGAMAN: Oh, it’s very much a part of the ongoing debate, and the President did talk about it and talked about what he’s intending to have the Secretary of Health and Human Services proceed with in the way of demonstration programs around the country. There are proposals that are clearly going to be brought up in our Finance Committee deliberations to deal with the problem of Tort Reform and getting away from so much defensive medicine, which the President also talked about. So I think it’s an issue, and it’s a valid issue to be discussed, and again, we’ll just have to see where the votes are when we start having votes in the Committee.

YOUNG: Is it something you could support, though?

BINGAMAN: Well, I can support some provisions related to Tort reform; others I would not. But I’ve got to see the specifics of them in order to make a judgment.

YOUNG: I’ve been told that in the room, in the meetings of the Gang of Six, that – well for one thing, I think it’s pretty clear that you, among those six, are the strongest supporter of the public option, and I don’t know if you agree with that, but it seems that way, that you – particularly since you know you voted for the bill in the HELP (ph) Committee that had that in there. We’ve talked about how you favor it, although you’ve also said here today and before that it’s not the be-all and end-all in the way that the President described it in his speech the other night, in addition to which, my understanding is that when it comes to making sure that the subsidies for insurance for low and middle-income people are adequate and that the benefits that they’d have access to in the insurance exchange are good, that you know maybe there’s the strongest voice in favor of those things in those meetings. And what I wanted to ask was, do you feel as though you have a special responsibility to represent the work that you and your colleagues did in the HELP (ph) Committee and to represent maybe the more liberal point of view among Senate Democrats when you’re in those meetings?

BINGAMAN: Well, I don’t feel that I have a particular responsibility; I’m basically just representing my own point of view, which I represented when we did the bill in the HELP (ph) Committee as well. I do think that if we’re going to have a package of – if we’re going to have a requirement on people, which, of course, we’re talking about doing, a requirement that people obtain coverage if they can afford it, then we need to help them to afford it, particularly low-income, moderate-income individuals, and so that’s been a focus of our discussions, and I think we’re doing reasonably well in that regard. There are – there are significant differences between what the HELP (ph) Committee has proposed in that regard or the House had proposed in that regard, and what we’re likely to wind up with in the Finance Committee, and of course the Finance Committee effort is constrained by the need to pay for whatever we do. That’s a big difference between the Finance Committee and what else has gone forward.

YOUNG: Senator, earlier you talked about the bill not only being deficit neutral, but maybe helping to reduce the deficit. I was back in New Mexico, as you know, for a couple of weeks covering these town hall meetings. That seemed to be sort of one of the biggest scoffing points when people you know somebody would say this is you know going to be deficit neutral or even save money. How do you save that money? Where are you going to save that money? Can you explain a little bit how you – how you arrive at that.

BINGAMAN: Yes, the President, I think, made the point of – very well in his speech that one – when you look ahead and say what’s going to happen to the federal budget deficits in the future, the biggest growth item in the budget deficits is healthcare spending, and particularly on Medicare, somewhat on Medicaid as well, and that is driven by the increase in the growth in healthcare costs throughout the society. So we’re trying to put in place provisions that will rein in the growth in healthcare costs, and I think the President’s example was that if you could reduce the growth in healthcare costs as much as 1/10 of 1%, you’d save $4 trillion I think was the figure he cited, and I don’t know for what period of time he was talking about. But if you go out far enough, I think there’s probably some …

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Ten years.

BINGAMAN: … yes, well, if – I’m not sure about the accuracy of all, but I do think that bringing – everyone uses the phrase bending the cost curve. If you reduce the growth in healthcare costs even a modest amount, you save enormous amounts in the federal budget.

YOUNG: Where you going to achieve most of those reductions? I mean just as an example, how do you – where do you save that money? What can you do?

BINGAMAN: Well, I think a lot of the growth in the federal budget is, I think most experts would say, is a result of over-utilization of the system, and when you – when you look at it and say how do you discourage some of that over-utilization of the system, one of the things – and again, the President talked about this – is companies selling healthcare policies that are so expensive that there’s no deductible, there’s no co-pays, there’s really no disincentive to anybody to just camp in their doctor’s office, even if their health situation doesn’t justify that. So what we’re talking about, what the President mentioned the other night, was putting a tax on these very high-end insurance policies so as to discourage companies from issuing those, have them pay an excise tax if they want to issue a policy or a family policy would be over $22,000 in premiums each year or something. The average in New Mexico’s about $11,500 each year. So we’re talking about a pretty rarified small group of policies, but it does, according to experts, help us reduce the over-utilization in the system, help us bring down the growth in healthcare costs.

SLEN: Senator Bingaman, are you satisfied with the level of political and legislative support that you’ve gotten from President Obama and from the Majority Leader Reid on this issue?

BINGAMAN: Oh, yes. I think the President has made this his top priority. He’s been very upfront about that. He’s been in regular communication with us. When I was working on the bill, we reported out of the HELP (ph) Committee, he was in regular communication. He’s been in regular communication with us in the lead up to the markup in the Finance Committee, and of course, his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, and others on his staff, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, they’ve all been very hands-on, trying to be helpful. And of course, Senator Reid, his position is he wants us to move ahead so that he can then take on this job of merging the two bills and bring something to the floor. He’s strongly in favor of accomplishing healthcare reform.

SLEN: And he’s endorsed cooperatives.

BINGAMAN: I saw that, and you know the proposal on cooperatives, of course, Kent Conrad from North Dakota has put that forward as an alternative to a strict public option. But as another way to bring competition into the health insurance marketplace, and I think depending upon how it’s implemented, it could be quite effective in bringing competition. As I say, my preference – I’ve always said this, my preference would be to do the kind of public option we adopted in the HELP (ph) Committee. But if that’s not something we can get the votes to do, then this idea of co-ops is certainly something to explore, and it could serve the same purpose, to a large extent.

SLEN: Jeff Young, one more question.

YOUNG: Well, over the course of these months, when you’ve been having these meetings in the Gang of Six and the Finance Committee, you’ve been sort of the quiet one. Senator Baucus obviously is Chairman. He talks to the press, and he’s on television. Senator Grassley, Senator Enzi and everyone else, they’re much more vocal about what the things they support on and what – the promise they have, and they’ve been much more kind of in the mix politically. I just wanted to ask you what your thinking behind that is. What – you know you’ve taken a different approach publicly, and I wondered if you could talk about that.

BINGAMAN: Well, I’ve just sort of – I thought that I could be most effective in the discussions that we are having among our group if I’m not doing a lot of talking outside and basically don’t get in the business of trying to debate the issues outside of our group, and that’s not just – that’s not just an approach I’ve taken with regard to this particular effort. I’m generally not having as many press conferences as some in the Congress, and I’m more comfortable with that. I think the public – I hope that most of the people who vote for me in New Mexico are confident that I’m working away trying to get the right thing done, and that’s where I hope it’ll come out.

SLEN: Michael Coleman.

MICHAEL COLEMAN, ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF: So I wanted to just kind of close this, switch gears a little bit. You're obviously still Chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. It’s …

BINGAMAN: Right.

COLEMAN: … been lost in the last few months in all the furor. But what can we expect for the rest of this year? You know you’ve got an energy bill that’s been passed out of the Committee, I believe. There’s a lot of talk about trying to mitigate climate change, a cap and trade bill that may or may not come up. What’s the forecast? Is it – do the Democrats have the stomach for another – maybe a big fight over cap and trade this year?

BINGAMAN: Well, frankly, I don’t know what’s going to happen on cap and trade. As you point out, the Committee that I chair, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has reported a bill that deals with the energy issues more directly, doesn’t try to do a cap and trade. That is in the jurisdiction of the Environment Committee primarily and to some extent in the Finance Committee. But I hope we can get the bill that we reported out of our committee up and considered by the full Senate. I hope we can also do something on the issue of cap and trade, but that’s still in the – in the work in progress category.

COLEMAN: Maybe a next year type of thing …

BINGAMAN: Well, I don’t know how quickly it’s going to be. My impression is that the end of this month, the Environment Committee is going to release a proposal, and then try to mark something up in October.

COLEMAN: And finally, back to healthcare, Senator Bingaman; illegal immigrants. You have a border state large illegal immigrant population. How do – how does the Senate deal with illegal immigrants with healthcare legislation?

BINGAMAN: Well, frankly, we have about 4% of our population in New Mexico that are determined or estimated to be undocumented right now. They don’t have access to healthcare except to the extent that they show up in an emergency situation and ask for healthcare. And that would continue to be the case. They would not have access to healthcare to the extent that we set up the state exchanges that the President’s talked about and that all of us have talked about and provide some type of a tax benefit to people so that they can purchase healthcare through those exchanges, those tax benefits would not be available to undocumented immigrants. I think it’s as clear as you can make in the legislation, as far as I’m concerned. It’s both in the HELP

(ph) Committee legislation and in the legislation that we’re like to report in the Finance …

SLEN: Senator Jeff Bingaman, member of the Gang of Six, thank you.

BINGAMAN: Thank you.

SLEN: And we’ll be right back with our reporters.

We are back with Michael Coleman of the Albuquerque Journal and Jeff Young of the Hill Newspaper. Michael Coleman, when we were talking with Senator Bingaman, you mentioned that you had been attending at Town Hall meetings in New Mexico. What was the Senator’s reception at those meetings?

COLEMAN: It was really a mixed reception. Senator Bingaman generally doesn’t do town halls, and he was I think actually sort of pressured to do them this time. People – you know he said he wasn’t going to do any at first, and people clamored. He ultimately did three or four. I attended a couple of those, and you know passions were running pretty high. New Mexico’s a swing state. We’re pretty closely divided. You’ve got a lot of people that were upset about the things that he was doing. Then you had a lot of more liberal people who were happy about the effort at reform. When he came out in August and said that he was ready to maybe abandon the public option, the liberals in New Mexico hit the roof. So he was kind of getting it from both sides. But he definitely got an earful and I think came back to Washington with something to think about.

SLEN: Jeff Young, did you learn anything from the senator and their deliberations today?

YOUNG: Well, I think the most interesting thing thematically overall from the way he talked about what the issues are, what needs to be done and you know the indications that there are some things that he believes in that he’s willing to compromise on a bit, what makes all of that interesting to me is how closely he attracts with the way the President talks about this issue and the way the congressional leadership has, and there’s been an evolution there. There’s been a lot of focus on this public option, and I actually agree with the President on one thing definitely, which is that it’s – it is only one part of the reform package, but it’s gotten most of the attention because you know it triggers feelings in people about what is the appropriate role of the government.

So it’s interesting for me to hear Senator Bingaman articulate his view on why that’s important, but why it’s not the be all and end all of healthcare reform in the same way that the President did in his speech the other night and in the way that we heard you know Senator Reid on Thursday, and you mentioned this, talking about how maybe these co-ops could do the same thing that the public option is supposed to do in terms of giving people an alternative to – for private health insurance, and the President mentioned that in his speech as well too. That’s – this public option issue has taken a long journey with Democrats, and there are many of them, particularly in the House, who feel very, very strongly that it has to be in the bill. Senator Bingaman is, I think, one of a relatively small number of Democratic members of Congress who have been open in saying I support this, but I’m not willing to hold up the entire process for it, and I think that you know we heard him say that again today, I think it’s significant.

SLEN: The House has already passed – or the House committees have already passed legislation. The HELP (ph) Committee has passed. President Obama has spoken. Is the Gang of Six still relevant, and they might crash legislation or come up with an agreement that the rank and file members don’t agree with.

YOUNG: Right. Well, I mean I think there’s been so much attention paid and pressure put on them, and the spotlight’s been on there. They’ve got to come up with something, I think, to at least present – and if it is something you know that I mentioned that you know Senator Grassley and Senator Enzi, the two Republicans who have sort of been walking away from it could ultimately support, I think that would really give it some momentum. But you know I guess it’s yet to be seen.

COLEMAN: Yes, I mean if they come out with a bipartisan bill, that really vindicates Senator Baucus’ approach to all of this, and Senator Bingaman and Senator Conrad, the two of the Democrats, for staying in this for long when so many Democrats were getting very frustrated with how much time they’ve been spending to Republicans, feeling that they were moving too far to the right to accommodate the three Republicans that they're negotiating with. That will be huge because if they can say we have a bipartisan bill, it will be very difficult for the White House or the extended Democratic leadership to say we don’t care; we’re moving ahead on our own anyway, and I think that that would flow through the rank and file, at least the way Senator Baucus puts it, for instance you know ultimately how many Democrats are going to be voting against a major healthcare reform bill despite what may or may not be in it. Even if they fail to get those Republicans, I think that it’s probably important from the Democrats’ point of view that they can say look how hard we tried. We tried to give them everything. We made compromises of the things that mattered to us. We spent months and months. We gave them all this extra time. At the end of it they walked away; that means they don’t really want a deal. They don’t really want to do healthcare reform, and I think that that talking point could be helpful to them in trying to win the public over because they can say, hey, look, we didn’t force this through. We tried really, really hard to get Republicans and they weren’t interested.

SLEN: Well, Senator Reid has vowed or has made a goal of passing a bill by Thanksgiving, but the real test comes down into the House and Budget Conference Committee meeting and crafting something to send to the President.

YOUNG: Right, and you know they’ve also got appropriations supposed to do this – starting doing this fall. It’s – I think if they don’t get it done by the end of the year, it really looks like a big failure. They’ve got to get some – I think they got to – they feel like they’ve got to get something done you know. And again you know we’ll wait and see what happens.

COLEMAN: Yes, at the end of the process, I mean it would be unbelievable to me if they didn’t pass something and then call it healthcare reform, and that even if it’s a small bill, if the President doesn’t have something that has the word healthcare on the top of the page that he can sign on the bottom you know it’s shades of 1993 all over again, it will be very, very bad for them, and I think ultimately that’s what – that’s what the leadership is counting on is that at the end of the day, even there are people on the left or people in the middle of the Democratic Party who are not happy with parts of that bill, the argument that the White House has been making privately to people is that it’s bad for all of us if we didn’t pass something, so find a way to like this.

YOUNG: And we’ll have to see if you know Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership is going to be as intractable as I’ve seen on this public option. I think that’s you know – we’ll wait and see.

SLEN: Well, the Gang of Six meets again tomorrow, so stay tuned. Jeff Young, Michael Coleman, thanks for being on …

COLEMAN: Thanks. My pleasure.

END