MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript

Interview

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Could we solve the health crisis just by building on what works? If so, I doubt that the public option is going to get a particularly teary funeral from a lot of liberals.

Joining us now is Congressman Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York. Congressman, thank you very much for coming on the show. It's nice to see you.

REP. ANTHONY WEINER (D-NY): It's my pleasure. Thank you.

MADDOW: You're a progressive. You have supported Medicare for all. After we've seen a big rightward drift in the health reform debate over the last couple of months, are we now closing in on something that you think you could support?

WEINER: Oh, I certainly do. I mean, let's remember something. The public option is something of a contrivance and a compromise for people like me who believe that, look, we've had an experiment for the last 44 years in health care for those over 65 and it's worked.

It's low overhead. You don't have to worry about profits. Ninety-six percent of all people on Medicare say that they like it. Why did we come up with the number 65? Why not 55 or 45, like you said in your introduction?

You know, I think that we would have made a much smarter decision to begin with Medicare and grow it. People understand it. You don't have all the confusion in town hall meetings.

And you don't have that weird schizophrenia in my Republican friends who say, "We're against public plans, but we like Medicare." So I think this is not the camel's nose under the tent. This is his head, his neck, and his shoulders towards what we really should be doing - is thinking about how we take that Medicare experience and expand it to more Americans.

MADDOW: I'm going to get a little hardball here in the sense that just talking about the hard-edged politics of this. It seems to me like if liberals were really good negotiators, liberals would be crying and marching in the streets right now, talking about how awesome the public option is, how much they're going to demand the moon and the stars in return for being forced to give it up.

That's not happening. A lot of liberals, myself included, talking openly about the fact that the public option had been whittled down to something almost useless. Is this a bad negotiating tactic?

WEINER: Well, I've got to tell you - part of the concern I'm concerned about. I want to make sure that my progressive friends, and I'm really not sure who it is that you can say really supports Medicare. It's broadly supported across the political spectrum.

Even my conservative Republican friends who opposed it when it was created say that's such a great thing now. They don't even want to cut one dollar out of it. But the most important thing is we need to keep in mind what our values are and then let someone else decide what the politics are.

We started this debate by saying we need to have more affordable coverage for more Americans. Well, Medicare is a great place, with its one percent overhead to start. If John McCain and John Thune want to hold a press conference attacking this proposal because I like it, well, that's fine for them.

But I think we should keep in mind what we tried to do. This is going to be a success if we expand the program that works. And isn't that what we always say in Washington? Let's take what works and build on it. Let's get rid of what doesn't.

We were all negotiating about what to do if we can't expand Medicare. Well, now we're back at that place. I'll let the politics take care of itself, because I think this is good policy.

MADDOW: On the issue of Medicaid, which is, as we said earlier, for disabled and lower income Americans, one of the common - one of the pieces of common wisdom about policy in general is that programs that are intended just for the poor tend to be poor programs, because there aren't a lot of people with a lot of clout to complain and get improvements when they are not well served by these programs.

Would Medicaid get better by force if more middle-class people were in it?

WEINER: Well, this is an example where the House bill is a lot better than the Senate bill. We do two things to make sure that Medicaid doesn't become a dumping ground. Two, we increase the reimbursement rates for doctors, so it's not such low reimbursement rates that no doctors want to be it and the quality of care is diminished.

And second, we don't dump responsibility on the states to fund half of it the way it is now. We have a race to the bottom for a lot of states. Since the states have to pay for half of Medicaid, they have a way of diminishing the services.

But I think that, ultimately, what we should have is Medicare for all Americans and that is people of all incomes, of all age groups. That's the way we should do it, a single-payer system that takes out the profit, takes out the overhead and says, "Listen, we're already giving our money to doctors. Why are we giving 20, 25 to 30 percent to insurance companies for their profits?"

And that's why Medicare has been a success. We have a financing problem that can't be overlooked, but at least we know money going into Medicare is actually going to patients.

MADDOW: Congressman Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. You are one of the clearest, most clear-spoken people on this issue, inside or outside of Washington. That's why we've had you on so frequently to talk about it. Thank you.

WEINER: Thank you.

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