Interview with Rep. Matt Cartwright
BLITZER: The president momentarily will go into the White House briefing room, make an announcement, one important element of the Affordable Care Act will be delayed in order to keep this commitment to the American people that if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. The president will go into specifics later. His aides will go into many more specifics, as they brief reporters and the American public. Gloria Borger is here. Gloria, this fix, as the president will call it, administrative fix, executive fix, no legislation required, will require cooperation from the insurance companies because they've canceled all of these plans. Now the president's saying un-cancel them, these folks like them, let them have them.</s>BORGER: First question we were talking about earlier was, does the president actually have the authority to do this? And I'm told that the president has what's called a lot of transitional authority, meaning that as you transition into the Affordable Care Act, the president does have some authority to say, look, if things aren't working well, we can change our road map a little bit.</s>BLITZER: They delayed the employer mandate for a year.</s>BORGER: Exactly. Exactly. So I believe the insurance companies, I'm told, believe that they have no choice, at this point, but to cooperate with the president. I'm sure they're not happy about it. They all believe, as do lots of people, this means that the law could well go into a death spiral because it changes the whole character of the risk pool, because the people who might renew those policies are the healthy, young people who have these -- many have these individual policies, and you'd rather them in the risk pool so that to help pay the bills for the older, unhealthy people who are going to go into that pool. So the insurance industry is skeptical. It's worried. It believes, in the end, this will result in increases in premiums that they're going to be blamed for. And, of course, Republicans will blame Democrats for it when they occur. But at this point, they believe they have no choice and that the president does have some authority to ask that this be done and so they'll cooperate.</s>BLITZER: We'll see if the president does it and if these insurance companies will cooperate.</s>BORGER: OK.</s>BLITZER: Hold for a moment. We just heard the speaker of the House, John Boehner, says scrap the whole plan, you can't fix it, get rid of. Almost all the Republicans agree with him. The Democrats disagree. But there are voices among the Democrats beginning to waffle, shall we say. Let's bring in Democratic Congressman Matt Cartwright from Pennsylvania. Where do you stand, Congressman, on the issue going forward? Is it fixable or should the president just delay not only the one element of the Affordable Care Act but the whole thing?</s>REP. MATT CARTWRIGHT, (D), PENNSYLVANIA: Well, Wolf, you have to start from the backdrop. My district, where we have seen a downward spiral of the health care delivery industry, we've seen hospitals closing, rates spiraling up. Health care is broken in northeastern Pennsylvania, and that's why I support the Affordable Care Act. It is a shame that the website isn't working. It's unfortunate the president oversold that one piece of the plan. And I think that the fix that, as suggested now, is probably appropriate. It's certainly better than the Upton bill that would be coming up tomorrow. Upton bill is a huge overreaction to that problem. It seems like extending that question one year for the people who did have policies and wanted to keep them. That is a much better tailored answer to the problem at hand. If you support the Affordable Care Act --</s>BLITZER: I was going to say, Congressman, you think the president can do this without additional legislation?</s>CARTWRIGHT: I do. Obviously, insurance companies are not thrilled about it because it's going to change the equation. They're going to have to sharpen their pencils and go back to the drawing board. But they've done that before. Look, we get back to what Governor Leavitt, from Utah, said when he was head of HHS and they were rolling out Medicare Part D. There were headaches. There were problems. There were terrible conundrums. People didn't understand the new situation. But in the end, it worked out and people loved it. And nobody remembers those headaches now. And Mr. Leavitt, Governor Leavitt, says these days openly, everybody take a deep breath, this is going to be a good thing in the long run. Don't get crazy about these speed bumps that we're hitting as we roll these things out.</s>BLITZER: Congressman Cartwright, Democrat of Pennsylvania, thanks very much for joining us.</s>CARTWRIGHT: You bet.</s>BLITZER: All right. We're standing by for the president. Once again, he's running a few minutes late. We'll get word from the president on this, what they're calling a temporary fix, one-year fix if you will, on his commitment if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. A one-year delay of at least one key component of that. We'll squeeze in another quick break.