[inaudible conversations] >> good morning. this is in the white house press. come on, you can smile. come on, john. i want to tell you i met john

akin looper for the first time. we went to the tableaux -- come right out. we went to the tableaux leadership activities here a few years ago. john is an entrepreneur. he has common sense guy and i liked him from the time i met him. fortunately, we been able to get together to do something here and that is to try to create a health care bill that will make sure it's affordable, sustainable and people can keep their coverage and that can lead us to transition to something that would allow us to control health care costs over time because that's a big issue. you can't have health care costs going through the roof. the cbo data analysis for yesterday is really not acceptable to me in terms of being governor. i'm not just thinking about the impact it has on ohio mall and governor because i'm only there for eight timor months. i'm thinking about the overall impact on the country and

long-term impact. there are a number of things come in three points in particular that has me deeply concerned. number one is the loss of coverage for millions and millions of americans. who would lose this coverage? you know, mentally ill, drug addicted, chronically ill. i believe these are people that need to have coverage and those who are the working poor. one thing we need to understand about medicaid expansion when people get on it, they are only on it for 18 months. people get on it and they rent for a lifetime. they were absolutely not. they try to get a job. some of them have problems. i don't know how many of you are aware -- am sure most of you are aware of the problems connected to drug abuse and how hard it is for somebody to get clean and stay clean. the same issue as they are at the mentally ill who need constant treatment if they suffer from these very severe illnesses. of course the chronically ill meet comfort as well.

if you don't have a system that does that come you have a problem. you have a loss of coverage of millions of people. the non-offending they put into medicaid, just medicaid as a whole is even less than what the house had and what the house had was not adequate. we may have been able to struggle to receive maximum flexibility including the ability to exclude pharmaceutical companies from being able to put high-priced drugs on our formulary, but we were not given that flexibility. the senate then came and dramatically reduce the amount of money in the overall medicaid budget. on the exchange site, one thing shocking to me is there's not enough funding over there as well so here you have a situation where the house that appears, we don't have all the analysis, actually has more money for the tax credit to support those on the exchange. the problem with that is those

tax credits were not big enough. there did the bulls would be skyhigh. these three things, which are fundamentally the resources fall short, so it would leave a lot of people in a really difficult situation and there are many other things we are turned about. let's think about it this way. you know, i want everybody in the country to put themselves in the shoes of people who are trying to better their lives. if you don't have good health care, if you are sick come you can't work. if you are hungry, it's unlikely you're going to be able to work. what we are trying to do is have a system that encourages people to work, improve their lives and i think the bill is inadequate. i've had a number of conversations in the last 24 hours with people calling in and here's what i would suggest. today i would call on democrat

senators to hold a press conference and to state that they are willing to sit and work and constructively engage with republicans and with republicans and coming up with a sustainable solution, something sustained over a period of years, a sustainable solution that can write a situation, that can improve this bill come even if they have to start over again, that is fine. there are elements they can keep. democrat senator should stand and challenge the republicans to negotiate with them. if the democrats don't want to participate that way, shame on them and they are playing party politics and what's good for a nation. if both parties get together, and i have little doubt in my mind. i've seen it with contentious issues, whether it's civil rights, whether it was negotiations between tip o'neill

and ronald reagan on social security, whether it was negotiations i was involved with on balancing the federal budget with the clinton administration after a government shutdown. people with good intent can sit down and fashion a solution on insurance for people was the same time beginning the discussion about what we can do about the rising cost of health care. this can be done and should be done not in a partisan way, but a bipartisan way. that is the way you can do this. there are big challenges with this bill. no one should think i have any choice in being able to work against the leadership of my own party on this legislation. maybe jfk said it best. sometimes i party asks too much. in the course of being able to solve these problems, anytime i will deviate, people will be upset with me, when i said i

don't oppose a gradual phaseout of the enhanced match for medicaid expansion. people got all worked up. my job is to be intellectually honest through this process. that's what i intend to do. john hicken luper, i'm great to be teamed with him. i love the way he thinks. i love the way he does his job as governor and isn't it great, isn't it great to recognize republicans and democrats can stand on the same podium on a tough issue and get along and be constructive. this is the way it used to be. while i don't want to go backwards, maybe in some sense going back to the future may be the way to be able to solve these big looming problems that are right over the landscape of america. we can get this done. john. >> thank you, governor. i can't easily express how grateful i am. governor kasich has been a leader on this and worked on

this for a long time. the notion that the senate will do a bill in secret in a very short amount -- short period of time and bring it out and have it try to sell the notion that this is an improvement in health care is a bad joke. we've been calling this the own health care bill just because there is no improvement in pretty much only cats. it takes a tremendous amount of courage to stand up like governor sandoval of nevada, other governors -- governor baker, you know, governor hutchinson has had serious conversations about these bills. that kurds -- that is what this comes down to. it is in your marrow. this isn't a political decision. it is a moral issue. i wrote down some of the numbers that colorado would see.

we would see a reduction of 188,000 people in colorado. half of them would be in rural parts of the state. again, that's the place where it's hardest to get good medical coverage as it is. also about 50,000 people right now through our private exchanges by not giving them stability, we will end up cutting coverage. that's not improving anything. at a certain point if this bill went through as the days, you would have a level by some estimates of over 100,000 deaths over the next 10 years and governors would be in a difficult position, impossible position to allocate resources for you know you are not have the coverage. ultimately, you know, governor kasich and i will not agree on everything. writing this bill we have to spend a lot trying to figure out the compromises and how we get to that place and we both agree we've got to control health care

at all levels, certainly in terms of the private exchanges and medicaid. we've got to make sure we also don't rollback coverage. it is immoral and may think to try and push that on the country for the benefit of who's benefiting from this bill? it's not improving health care. $230 billion for the highest earners and the people with a large amount of income. i've talked to a couple dozen and ask each one, does it matter when you're making $2 million a year or have a frank in his life together make $100,000 year and it'll save several hundred thousand dollars. they don't care. it's not something they're asking for. every single high earner wealthy individual, you know, in the country there's less than 4 million people that receive these tax benefit.

why are we making this huge cut in what services we offer to the public solely for tax cuts for people that are trained to get it. same thing with the insurance companies that have a tremendous benefit to this. the industry is neutral. if you look at the hospital association, american medical association, they are all against the bill and standing up for the common good. i hope you and governor kasich i will finish it and take questions. i hope we are able to take this on health care bill and put it aside, start over and i would be proud to have some republican and democratic governors work with democrat republican senators to implement this stuff and we work across party lines all the time. somehow the virus that's in washington hasn't gotten into the ecosystem yet.

it's certainly working around the margins. in a transparent open way, spend several months, probably six or eight months to look at what would a good look like and how do we get there? [inaudible] >> you know, i think that today's politics at the politics of today's people we cover in my state 700,000 people who are drug addicted and mentally ill and also chronically ill. when you sit and talk to people about this, they really don't have much disagreement.

there may be some philosophical, you know, kind of textbook disagreement. but when you sit in a room and you say to people, should restrict coverage? from somebody who is mentally ill, i've never heard anybody say yes. we know about the drug troubles in this country. it's reaching all across the country. we know how difficult it is and it takes as much as four or five times sometimes for people to be able to escape their addiction and sometimes they don't. the same is true with the chronically ill. you say to people, do you think they should be an emergency room treva necker coster should beget and some primary care? i've never had anybody argue that with me. so they want to kind of repeal this expansion, where are they going to put the people? my sense was expansion should have gone up to 100% of poverty instead of 138 and we could've taken the people and put them on the exchange at the exchange was

adequately funded. i understand his campaign promises and all that stuff. i try not to make campaign promises i can't keep them if i make one that i think doesn't measure up, i'll be a big enough person to say i'm looking at it a different way. but i don't think it makes any sense in america today. by the way, even though we are talking about the poor, over time, these actions will impact the middle class. you will have more people living in emergency rooms, which dries up all of our health care costs. the working poor, people that we want to be able to have bigger income, who can join the middle class are in the edges of middle class could be hurt if these things are not funded appropriately. so you know what, one final thing. i am a conservative. i balanced our budgets in many of these people criticizing me.

i was the chief architect of the balanced budget in washington and with fiscal stability and case and cut taxes more than any other governor. i have a right to be conservative as much as anybody else. i am actually in the fray. i'm in the arena. i'm not sitting on the outside writing some white papers somewhere. to me, everybody should have a chance. what does conservatism mean? everybody should have an opportunity to realize their hopes and dreams and without adequate health care, it's virtually impossible and i sure wouldn't want any of these folks who are so highly critical to find themselves in a position where it could affect her family. one last thing. one last income i went to a major newspaper and had somebody sit next to me. the paper has been very critical of a lot of the health care stuff. the lady sitting next to me said could i speak to you after the meeting and i said sure. she whispered to me after everybody had left the room.

thank god you expanded medicaid because if you hadn't my cousin would've died. it made me kind of shocked, almost knocked me off my chair. i think there's things we here in politics and things and the reality of the matter and pay attention to people and feel disenfranchised in this country, that leads to a healthy america, not just a healthy person. [inaudible] >> well, there's no resources in it. that's the problem here. john's book i was calling about the fact that what you've done is given a lot of money to people who are already very wealthy and denied the resources to run the program. there's no resources in here, so they have to cut everything

back. look, i've talked about a seven-year phaseout that gave us a lot of flexibility. i think john and i can agree or disagree on whether the decoder 138 or 100. a strong exchange i'd rather get people in the private health insurance on exchange, but you can't get people like three or $4000 expect them to buy health insurance. deductibles are so high they have to sell their home if they even owned one. there's ways to do this and we submitted plans and letters and we can get this done. i have no doubt about it, but there'll have to be some decisions made that will go against the political promises and have to be more realistic and ultimately we have to deal with the problem of rising health care costs and we have a lot of thoughts about that. one final thing. do you understand that i would like to have the leverage, every governor would like to have the leverage on a pharmaceutical firm that if they have high prices for drugs, we don't have

to include them in our formulary. we are going to get better prices. it doesn't seem anybody wants to do that and we don't want to bash the pharmaceutical companies. we want to be in a position of where we have leverage and a good negotiation and end up with something that serves everybody. [inaudible] >> he certainly is looking at it very seriously. he understands the importance. i talked to him probably a couple months ago, but he was very focused on figure out a way to get coverage rolled back. he is someone whose conservative, but he also doesn't think it means putting and putting hundreds of thousands at risk. just in colorado, billions in the country.

[inaudible] >> i haven't. before there is any vote. i will camp out on the doorstep if i have to. again, he knows what i'm going to say. this is the question again in your dna if you are in this game for the right reasons, to make sure that the decisions you make will look back. we are all going to finish these jobs, look back five or 10 years from now and i think you should want to be proud of the decisions he made. make decisions based on what's right in the greatest good for the greatest number of people and not just campaign promises. you are cutting $230 billion for the wealthiest people in america. how many of the vast majority are republicans? some portion that will be used to lobby and attack whoever.

senator heller in nevada right now had a million dollars in attack ads that is why it takes tremendous growth to step up. tori gardner has the courage. i'm very hopeful and he certainly knows and it had other people talk about how important this is to me. this is one of the bedrock issues he will define himself by. [inaudible] >> well you know, senator gardner grew up on the plains of colorado and he builds his life with his own two hands, stellar career at university of colorado. he's a smart, talented guy but he understands the hardships and difficulties of rural life. this bill would punish people in colorado. an old friend who's a geologist way out in colorado. he would end up paying $25,000 a year for health care. he makes $74,000 right now.

it would be impossible. how's he going to get health care? corey gardner gets that. he understands hardships. we will see. [inaudible] >> if they don't do that, would you beat this bill? >> absolutely. this bill is unacceptable to me. the thing is words matter. in this town they matter so much more than they ever have. we could kid each other and josh each other and then go down and play basketball. now you look at somebody the wrong way and become the enemy. this town is dysfunctional. i am hopeful -- i think of these democrat senators come out, you get five or six or seven or eight of them and say we are willing to sit down and work

together to come up with a product double work for the country. what do the republicans say? no, we are not interested, thank you ima go away. drop dead. i don't think so. the question that a democrat senators put out some press release in whatever mingo junction, colorado, are they willing to stand up on a stage and say we are committed to working on this. john is right. there is contentious issues. when john and i put the letter together, what kind of take on things we could agree on. that's the way you negotiate. pick on some basic things you agree on get into the details do not burn your subjects and work it out. i've been involved in more negotiations whether more negotiations weathered about the b-2 bomber, the balanced budget, when people have a common purpose, they always figure out a way to be successful. the same is true in my state.

the fact is the people of goodwill and good intentions can get it done. but you have to think about when you leave washington or any of that did position, did you leave people in a position of where they felt respected, lifted and given an opportunity? or did you just look at lines on a piece of paper and make a decision because the lines are flesh and blood. it is written in ink and print, but underlying all of that is the flesh and blood of the impact. i don't care what subject are talking about. if they don't want to improve the bill and not for this bill, but i'm optimistic. i really am optimistic that cooler heads prevail. john and i been here didn't do this because we want to come here and talk to all of you. i'm here because i've gotten a meeting because i'm will talk to the business and may stay. john and i are here because we actually feel strongly about this. the last thing you want to do is be hoisted on on health

righteous, but for some reason it's deep in my heart to think about these people who don't have much in those who are trying to have much. those who are trying to better their lives. i don't want to deal them a blow when they took a look around and see the richness of america prospering. it's time for republican party and democratic party to realize we are in a potential meltdown, the division between the rich and middle class becoming more divided from the rich. we have to work together. america is strongest when we believe in one another and there is a sense of fairness in our country. that's what we need to achieve. [inaudible] >> i told them how important all of this is. i don't cast his vote. i don't get any sense. we will see what happens when

the card goes in the box or however they vote in the senate. >> he said there needs to be a bipartisan solution and the only way they look at to table as if republicans take repealing obamacare off the table. does that mean you're not in favor of repealing nevada care? >> i've been in changing the health care system that works. here's the thing. what's happened to republicans is for seven years they've run around bashing obamacare. now they don't know what to do. 22, 23 million americans whose health insurance and they think that is great and the good public policy. are you kidding me? why don't we have those folks go and live under a health care under medicaid for a while? why do we have been live on an exchange or they can get two, three, $4000 a year to cover their health care exchange costs. i had a democrat, yesterday, so

should we kill the bill? language matters. don't put stuff. don't put stuff in peoplespace. you don't have to talk about killing the replays. get it done. in the room and figure out how we can bring needed change is because there is nobody i know, no responsible public official or health advocate who doesn't think we need changes to this. the exchanges are in trouble. a lot of the reason they are in trouble is because they're so much uncertainty because they don't have a healthy pool and thus can be fixed. you don't have a say we are just going to throw everything out. maybe start over. i don't know. i would rather like to fix the senate bill to get democrats working. that's what i would like to do. in terms of kasich says this, i guess i'm not taking the bait. yes, sir. right here. [inaudible]

why is this incumbent on the democrat going forward and not republicans? >> vote, we have a health care civil war going on. it's all about recrimination. obama slammed everything through and we weren't included, and now here we are and we don't have to listen to them. all parties. of course we want republicans to stand out. you don't know how many hours i spent, might assess and trying to get people to sign on to a simple letter. [inaudible] a couple weeks ago. i've talked to rob a million times. he knows exactly what my concerns are. i told them if they can do a few billion dollars on opioids, you know, repealing medicaid expansion is $4 billion a year is like spitting in the ocean. everything in america is not just about opioids. what about mental illness?

i happen to think in the essential health benefit package there should be protection to give flexibility to states, but there should be protection for services for the mentally ill who have been ignored for as long as i've been alive and for those who are the big day. i think there have to be some guardrails around that. i think republicans ought to say we welcome democrats and that the democrats come forward and say we are not going to cooperate. they talk about that and criticize them. let's give both sides moving forward and see where we are. we act like we are in the fifth grade. actually in the congress of the united states. we are not in the fifth grade. what did sally say about you. that is gone out the window. even my girls don't do that. or voice for that matter. we are not in the fifth grade. joey took my skateboard.

we don't have skateboards anymore. took my smartphone. >> you both would restore the money for obamacare. are there anything you agree on that should go into the bill that would represent the proven medicare. trauma care, whatever than obamacare. read our letter >> i would say it's basic math. you can't take all the resources away without doing terrible damage to everybody in this country. basic math. you can pull seven or $800 billion cut and expect the system to survive in any sense of capability. in terms of what we agree on, in

terms of essential health and if it being wiped out, what governor kasich just talked about in terms of the dollhouse, people with addictions, addressing basic things like screaming. millions of people would disappear. i have a sister who threw basic screening found that her kidney had a malignant tumor. got it out. she has a high probability of a happy life. if you don't have that basic ability, will you go when you got a little discomfort and you get a check, that gets so much more -- the survival rate just goes in the toilet. i think if you go down the list of stuff, that's a good base to start. the basic fundamental of good health coverage. look, i was the first one to advance the idea of overtime with flexibility, a phaseout of

the enhanced match down to the regular state match. why did i say that? i told my guys, let them say what they want. why do i say that? at some point, states have to assume this responsibility. the senate has the best i can tell a phaseout. not sure why it works -- how it works. i talked to john about this. the federal government is running a level that's about 80% of gdp. when you get to 100%, forget it. look at great britain. look at japan. we have to appeal to the debt. what the senate did on the phaseout make some sense. i don't know how it works, but make some sense. the idea we should have flexibility on essential health benefits make sense on medicaid and also on the exchange, but when i mention guardrails, their ascent and set out to be

mandated. i like what the senate did in terms of getting the federal government out of the insurance business with the ratios. the three to one or the fiber one is a good thing. there are things that they've done in here that are good. i happen to believe you cannot medicate up to 100% rather than 138. that has been discussed and move things over and make change. the idea you could have a per capita cap is well-funded. i support that. in other words, many things. you know if this gets down to? the resources. if you have a beautiful car but you don't have any gas, it won't go or if you don't have any electricity, it won't go. the problem is the resources need to remain. a word left the revenues and plays for a period of time you

can get rid of these resources month ago. because how are you going to have the money to fund the thing? all of it is not bad or the fundamental aspect they are simply not there. and it has to be fixed. we need to guarantee all americans the preexisting condition will never result in them losing health insurance. is there somewhere, i don't know where they are because i've never met them. thank you for allowing us to be here. let's see where it all goes. thank you. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> this afternoon at 2:00 eastern, u.s. senate will return for more speeches on the health care law replacement bill the governors were talking about. nothing official yet, but there could be action as soon as tomorrow. but if they move forward with debate on the bill. senate democrats hold a rally on the steps of the capitol at 1:00 p.m. eastern on what they say would be the devastating impact the senate health care bill would have on middle-class americans. that is at 1:00 p.m. eastern and will have it here on c-span2. senate democrats held a news conference yesterday about going