NBC "Meet The Press" - Transcript

Interview

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We're now going to introduce by remote chairman of the Banking Committee, Senator Chris Dodd; and Republican Whip, Senator Jon Kyl.

Senators, welcome both of you back to the program.

SEN. JON KYL (R-AZ): Thank you.

SEN. CHRIS DODD (D-CT): Thank you, David.

GREGORY: Senator Dodd, I want to start with you.

SEN. DODD: Yeah.

GREGORY: You are involved in these negotiations to figure out the final form of healthcare legislation. And you're hearing from Valerie Jarrett this morning, a senior adviser to the president, he will not demand a public option as most of his supporters want. Will it be in there? Should it be in there?

SEN. DODD: Well, it should be in there, and--because for a number of reasons. Not just for the politics of it; but if you're trying to increase competition, drive down costs, reduce the impact on the federal budget, these are all reasons why a public option is necessary if you're truly trying to get your arms around this. And what we've drafted here in, in these bills, I think, gives us that opportunity and that chance. In the absence of that, the alternate is to, of course, to make this more affordable by driving up subsidies, which increase the cost of the bill. So we have some tough choices to make. But I think the public option makes the most sense...

GREGORY: OK.

SEN. DODD: ...if, in fact, you want competition. So that's why we're going to do it.

GREGORY: So how is it going to, how is it going to happen?

SEN. DODD: Many states have only one or two insurance companies.

GREGORY: How's it going to happen? The president's not going to push for it...

SEN. DODD: Well, we're going to...

GREGORY: ...who's going to push this across the finish line.

SEN. DODD: Well, the president's deeply involved, and you heard the statements from Valerie that he's very much for it, said so again the other day. And my hope is that when we bring these two bills together over the next number of days that we'll present to the Senate an option that includes that strong public option. Then the Senate will obviously, the full Senate, as Jon knows, will have an opportunity to vote it, to take it out of the bill, to modify it in some way. But my strong belief is we ought to include that as we move forward in the Senate.

GREGORY: But aren't we beyond--Senator, aren't we beyond strong beliefs? I mean, isn't this brass tacks time? What have you got in terms of the votes? You've got one Republican senator who's not for it, you've got conservative Democrats who are not for it. They seem to have most of the influence over the final package here.

SEN. DODD: Well, David, you'll recall just this even spring I've had a number of bills that have come out, they came out of committee with one-vote margins. And when you end up on the floor of the Senate, you find sometimes you get more. About half the Senate has been involved already between the Health Committee and the Finance Committee. The other half of our Senate colleagues have only had to give talks about this, and they'd like to express themselves. So I haven't given up on this. We had the, the credit card legislation, which I drafted that came out of the Banking Committee with a one-vote margin, passed on the floor of the Senate 90-to-5. The same was true with the tobacco legislation, came out of the committee with a one-vote margin, passed the Senate 85-to-7 or something like that. So I'm still confident when we get to the floor and, and you've got to make a choice between bringing down costs affecting the budget as well as increasing competition, then we have a good, good chance of including the public option in the bill.

GREGORY: Senator Kyl, let me bring you in here. In terms of who's got the most influence over this process, I mentioned Gerald McEntee, the head of the AFSCME union. This is something that he said in an op-ed for The Wall Journal this week. He writes this: "Now we've got a Democrat in the White House and we expect some positive things. It looks like we catered to Senator [Olympia] Snowe. My God, she's a Republican, I thought we won." If you look at who does have influence over here, why is the Republican Party in the Congress completely opposed? Don't you have somebody who's got more similar views influencing the process?

SEN. KYL: Well, first of all, it's obvious there's a big fight going on within the Democratic Party between the House and Senate, between moderates and more liberal members of the, of the senators on the Democratic side. Republicans are kind of on the sideline here. We offered a lot of amendments, both in the HELP Committee and in the Finance Committee, they were all rejected on party line votes. The bill that's being written right now is being written in Harry Reid's office, behind closed doors, with Chris and Max Baucus and the leader and others. No Republicans need apply to come into that room. I think, though, if I could, David, it's a little bit beside the point, this whole question of the public option. It's an important issue, but it's not the most important issue. And at the end of the day, while I totally disagree with Chris about whether it's a good idea to have it in there, I think he's right that in a form it will be in there. But what they're really good at doing is putting it in a different package, putting a different color ribbon around it and saying, "Well, that's--it's only the public option. If things don't work out in a couple of years" or something like that. And that's the concern that a lot of Republicans have. It's why we've offered alternatives that do not rely upon a big government takeover and a public insurance company, but rather use the market that we have today, focusing on patients and trying to insure that we can both bring down costs and increase access to care without totally reforming the entire healthcare system.

GREGORY: I just want to pick up on, on one point, Senator Dodd, the idea of a public option in some form. One of the things that's been talked about is the idea of a trigger, a kind of Washington language for the idea that if in a, in a private system you don't have enough competition, you don't have enough, you know, competition bringing down prices ultimately for the consumer, that a government plan could kick in later on down in the line. Would you support that?

SEN. KYL: Absolutely not. It's...

SEN. DODD: Is that for me, David?

GREGORY: That's for you, Senator Dodd, yes.

SEN. KYL: Oh, I'm sorry.

SEN. DODD: Oh. Well, listen, I--as I said, in the HELP Committee bill we have a very strong public option that does exactly what I've described. And obviously, to move forward here, my hope is we'll keep that. But let me also suggest something to you, David, here. I thought Olympia Snowe, my--our colleague from Maine, said it very well the other day. When history calls, history calls. What are the alternatives here if we do nothing, as apparently some are suggesting? And by the way, as Jon knows, in the Health Committee, which I chaired over the summer here, 161 amendments, more than half the amendments adopted in that mark-up were amendments offered by the Republican side, which we accepted as part of that bill. But if you look that in the next seven years we could have premium costs go from $13,000 a year to $24,000, 3.5 million jobs could be lost in the process. The cost of business could double to nearly $1 trillion as a result of doing nothing. The impact of doing nothing is so much more costly than what we're talking about here that my hope would be that we, in these coming days here, get together on this. The American public cannot withstand more years of rising costs, rising premiums and more unemployment. That's why this is so important.

GREGORY: You know, it's interesting, Senator Kyl, in that vein, in terms of this kind of moral imperative, you and other Republicans have said this healthcare reform should be opposed, and one of the major reasons you cite is how much money it costs, how much it could potentially add to the deficit, although the president says it'll be deficit-neutral. And yet when you talk about the war in Afghanistan and the commanders should have more of their troops, I've never heard you say that that should be deficit-neutral, that war costs should somehow not break the bank. Why is that disparity there?

SEN. KYL: David, no country can afford to scrimp and save or try to win a war on the cheap. The president himself has said that the war in Afghanistan against these terrorists who killed over 3,000 American on September 11, 2001, is a war of necessity. You have to win it. And Americans throughout our history have sacrificed when war has called for us to do that.

GREGORY: And is it a, is it a necessity to tackle the fact that there are more and more Americans who die because they don't have access to health insurance?

SEN. KYL: I'm not sure that it's a fact that more and more people die because they don't have health insurance; but because they don't have health insurance, the care is not delivered in the best and most efficient way. Republicans have a lot of good ideas--and all those amendments Chris was talking about where technical amendments. We have very good ideas about how to tackle this problem one piece at a time and basically regain the trust of the American people by taking one step at a time rather than saying that we have to have a trillion-dollar bill. Yes, that will hurt our deficit. Remember, we just had the figures come out earlier this week, a $1.4 trillion deficit, more than all of the last four budget deficits combined. So when we're spending on war and when we're spending on other things we need to have, we don't have to spend as much on health care. We can do it one step at a time to target the problems that we have with targeted solutions.

GREGORY: Senator Dodd, one more question on health care. And to bring a bottom line in here, crystal ball time. After all of this debate, you have said getting a pretty good bill is not enough. So in the end, what version of healthcare reform gets passed?

SEN. DODD: Well, I think it--a strong bill that does exactly what we've talked about: increasing that access, increasing quality and making it affordable. Affordability, affordability. Just to site two states, by coincidence; in Jon's state there are 900,000 people without insurance, one in five in Arizona. He loses 280 people a day that drop insurance. I lose 100 a day. I've lost 28,000 people in Connecticut that have had their insurance dropped because they've lost their jobs in the last year alone, David. Those kind of numbers cannot continue. The people in Arizona and people of Connecticut, for every uninsured person, pay almost $2,000 in premium costs per year to pay for the health care showing up in an emergency room of the uninsured. We need to address this issue. So I'm hopeful accessibility, profitability, but affordability for middle-income families is going to be critical.

GREGORY: Let me move on...

SEN. KYL: David, I...

GREGORY: I want to just move on to the--with a couple of minutes.

SEN. KYL: No, can I just respond to that?

GREGORY: All right, go ahead, quickly.

SEN. KYL: In my, in my state this Oliver Wyman study, not the one that Chris criticized--or that you criticized earlier, in my state increased premiums for a family under this bill, $7,400. That's not the kind of reform that Arizona families are looking for.

GREGORY: Let, let me move on to the issue of what's happening on Wall Street and this expanded bonus pool and record profits. This is what The Wall Street Journal reported this week: "Major U.S. banks and security firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year--a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street's pay culture. ... Total compensation and benefits at the publicly traded firms analyzed by the Journal are on track to increase 20 percent from last year's $117 billion--and to top 2007's $130 billion payout." Senator Dodd, you're chairman of the Banking Committee. All of these bailouts, the state of the American worker, is there something upside down and wrong here?

SEN. DODD: Well, no, David. Look, first of all, the good news is the economy's getting stronger and getting better, and that's the positive news. We went from 700,000 job losses a month in January to numbers today which are not great, but they're a lot better than they were. And obviously, we're not talking about a depression as we were a year ago. So things are getting better. Now, obviously, when you see these bonuses being paid out, it's a source of outrage in the country, and it should be. What are these people thinking about at these companies? We have poured a lot of hard-paying taxpayer money into these firms to stabilize them, to get our economy moving again. We have banks that are not providing credit to smaller businesses and others to get the economy moving. Now, things like the clunker bill--Johnny Isakson, the senator from Georgia and I are working to extend the tax credit for home purchases, not just new homebuyers, things that will get the economy moving again. But these firms on Wall Street need to understand that what they're doing by providing these bonuses, particularly when they received so much federal money, is an outrage in the country. And my hope is that Ken Feinberg, who's walking on this--working on this, and others, we can do something about getting these firms to back up and reduce these bonuses.

GREGORY: Senator Kyl, should there be dollar amounts, should there be limits on compensation that the government sets?

SEN. KYL: Well, in the event that the government basically bails one of these outfits out, it has the, the right and the ability currently, as Chris just noted, to put limits on the compensation and the kind of compensation. But I think we need to get--be a little careful about this. In the Baucus bill that passed on--last week on the health care, there's a limit on insurance company salaries; not just for the top executives, but any employee or any consultant, the people that work for any consultant that's hired. So let's be a little bit careful that we don't get the government intruding in the business of America to the extent that our free enterprise system is crippled by business regulations.

GREGORY: All right. Finally, a final question, Senator Dodd, on politics, the politics of 2010. According to recent prose--polls, rather, your job approval rating in Connecticut is below 50 percent, at 43 percent. Why do you think voters are losing confidence in you?

SEN. DODD: Well, well, David, I'm not sure how to answer. We've been through a tough time, obviously, over the last year. But I'm confident, again--do the job, work hard on behalf of the people you represent--that those numbers'll turn around. These polls are a snapshot. Obviously you pay attention to them, but wish they were better. Obviously had difficulties. But I'm confident, again, a year from now that if I continue working hard on their behalf that these things will turn around.

GREGORY: We will leave it there. Senator Dodd, Senator Kyl, thank you both very much.

SEN. DODD: Thank you, David.

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