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Bret Baier, "Special Report" HOST: Top Obama 47-nation nuclear envelope to solve the problem of loss of nuclear material, saying his country to sign a plan for the next four years. .

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. China announced this week that its president, Hu Jintao will attend the next summit of nuclear safety in Washington April 12 and 13, ending weeks of speculation that the Chinese were involved.

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. A two-day summit brings together international nuclear in Washington on Monday, with nearly 50 nations, sending officers to participate in the discussion.

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A two-day summit brings together international nuclear in Washington on Monday, with nearly 50 nations, sending officers to participate in the discussion. .

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Now he's on a mission to provoke a serious debate on the Law of the costs to argue that "swallowed alive", if not controlled. When the numbers are the weapon of choice policies, the Republicans turn to Paul Ryan to make his fight. In preparation for the February 25 broadcast of the health care battle with President Barack Obama, was Ryan, a representative of the hills of southern Wisconsin and industrial zones, the task of challenging the health of Math 2 , 3 trillion of U.S. wages government review. At 40 years and in his sixth term in office, Ryan has the perfect combination of freshness and experience yet. In 2006 he spent the last 13 senior colleagues to become ranking Republican on the Budget Committee of the House.

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I am pleased to join with President Clinton and the Foundation for California to continue building on our work for a healthier future for our children and all Californians .. We have made considerable progress in promoting healthy eating and active living since my first summit in 2005 but still the action that you can do to promote a healthier world for all of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger said.

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They promised to renew his criticism of democratic legislation and speaking in general terms about how the private market can reduce healthcare costs and achieving "universal access" .. While the president tried to unite the Democratic Party behind a single proposal, Republicans have spoken with pride that bring new ideas to the table. Today Health bipartisan summit could be the end of the beginning of the reform of the health system.

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While the president has tried to unite the Democratic Party behind a single proposal, Republicans have spoken with pride that bring new ideas to the table. Health Today bipartisan summit could be the end of the beginning of the reform of the health system. They promised to renew his criticism of democratic legislation and speaking in general terms about how the private market can reduce healthcare costs and achieving "universal access" ..

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But does anyone think the substance of Obama’s health-care plan or the proposals of Republicans will change significantly at the summit? If they don’t, will the mere spectacle of the gathering and the dueling rhetoric be enough cause fundamental changes in the current political pecking order?. The gathering of President Obama and congressional leaders at Blair House has prompted the media to flood the zone, with wall-to-wall cable coverage and nonstop analysis befitting a history-making event.

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He said, “When is something going to happen on health care in America? I can’t hold out much longer.” I have a letter — and Michigan seems to be where I get some mail on this subject since I’ve travelled there recently — the woman who said that their family — to pay their deductible, they have to subtract it from their food budget. Let’s make sure that we talk about facts. It was caught late, and that’s a hard cancer to diagnose. And you said that the current system is in critical condition. What is the doughnut hole? Well, a senior citizen will tell you what the doughnut hole is. And that’s what I want to mention here in the next few minutes. I hear from families who have hit lifetime limits and because somebody in their family is very ill, at a certain point they start having to dig out of pocket and they are having to mortgage their house and in some cases have gone bankrupt because of health care. And I don’t need to tell people here about the effects on the federal budget. You, Mr. Thank you so much for participating today. And I hope that those who are here will agree I’ve got a pretty good record of working across party lines and of supporting the President when I believe he’s right, even though other members of my party might not on that occasion. Thank you, Mr. But I do remember the last six months of her life — insurance companies threatening that they would not reimburse her for her costs, and her having to be on the phone in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies when what she should have been doing is spending time with her family. It was almost a year ago, March 5th of last year, when you brought us together in a bipartisan way to set us on a path to lower cost, improved quality — expand access to quality health care for all Americans. We believe that our views represent the views of a great number of the American people who have tried to say in every way they know how — through town meetings, through surveys, through elections in Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts — that they oppose the health care bill that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve. Thank you very much for bringing us here today. And that’s just one of the concerns she mentioned. You began your remarks, Mr. Paul Ryan has discussed some of the issues surrounding Medicare. And the doughnut hole. I was very pleased to see a glimpse of bipartisanship in the Senate recently in passing a jobs bill, and I hope that continues, and I know there are going to be some additional pieces of legislation moving forward around, for example, making sure that small businesses can get financing. We have a moral obligation to reduce the deficit and not heap mountains of debt onto the next generations. It means that for millions of Americans premiums will go up because those — when people pay those new taxes, premiums will go up — they will also go up because of the government mandates. Several of us were part of the summits that you had a year ago, and so I’ve been asked to try to express what Republicans believe about where we’ve gotten since — since then. In its life it will create 4 million jobs — 400,000 jobs almost immediately; jobs, again, in the health care industry, but in the entrepreneurial world as well. And I’d like to just mention those in a sentence or two. But I’d like to make sure that this discussion is actually a discussion and not just us trading talking points. All right? SENATOR McCONNELL: Thank you very much, Mr. President, by saying there was a glimmer of bipartisanship in the Senate for the passage of the jobs bill. One is out; some are still in. That day, March 5th, Senator Kennedy said health care is a right, not a privilege. But we would like, respectfully, to change the direction you’re going on health care costs. We simply must make the cuts in waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare so that the benefits and the premiums are untouched. And what it means is a health initiative that is about affordability for the middle class, lowering costs, improving access for them. I can tell you many stories as I travel the country where I’ve seen grown men cry. I mean, if you look around the table — and I’m sure it’s true on the Democratic side, as it is on the Republican — we’ve got shoe store owners and small business people and a former county judge and we’ve got three doctors. They want to give consumers more choices and insurance companies more competition. I’ve looked very carefully at John Boehner’s plan that he put forward. You can say that this process has been used before, and that would be right, but it’s never been used for anything like this. (Laughter.) Not wanting to be a hypocrite, I wanted to give you some slack. Appreciate being here. In the individual markets, it’s even worse. And my request is this, is before we go further today, that the Democratic congressional leaders and you, Mr. You have talked about how the present system is unsustainable for families, for businesses large, modern and large, small — any size, and how it’s unsustainable, as you said on March 5th of last year. I want to start by talking about a young man by the name of Jesus Gutierrez. So it’s like giving someone a ticket to a bus line where the busses only run half the time. I want you to know there was a blaze of bipartisanship in the House yesterday — with, what, 406-19, we passed under leadership of Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, Tom Perriello, Betsy Markey and others the lifting — repealing the exemption that insurance companies have on health insurance and the antitrust laws for health insurance — 406-19, a very strong message that, yes, the insurance companies need to be reined in. It means there will be about a half trillion dollars of new taxes in it. Now, some say we need to rein in the insurance companies; maybe we do. For people who couldn’t afford it, we would provide them some subsidies. I hear from small businesses who have just opened up their new rates from their insurance company and it turns out that the rates have gone up 20, 30, in some cases 35 percent. It’s not appropriate to use to write the rules for 17 percent of the economy. So that’s why we continue to insist that as much as we want to expand access and to do other things in health care, that we shouldn’t expand a system that’s this expensive; that the best way to reduce cost — to increase access is to reduce cost. And it strikes me that if we’ve got an open mind, if we’re listening to each other, if we’re not engaging in sort of the tit-for-tat and trying to score political points during the next several hours, that we might be able to make some progress. And we know how to do that. He works hard. When Republicans were trying to change the rules a few years ago — you and I were both there; Senator McCain was very involved in that — about getting a majority vote for judges, then-Senator Obama said the following: “What we worry about is essentially having two chambers, the House and the Senate, who are simply majoritarian — absolute power on either side. The basic concept is that we would set up an exchange, meaning a place where individuals and small businesses could go and get choice and competition for private health care plans, the same way that members of Congress get choice and competition for their health care plans. This is such a complicated issue that it’s inevitably going to be contentious. He has a restaurant in Reno, Nevada. And so I know both the House and the Senate are interested in how do we propel economic growth forward; how do we create more jobs. You mentioned Mike Enzi’s work on the small business health care plan. Now, everybody here has those same stories somewhere in their lives. And we’ll just go back and forth between the Democratic leaders and the Republican leaders, House and Senate, and then we’ll just open it up and we’ll start diving in. But to do that, we’ll have to renounce jamming it through in a partisan way. I can’t mention health care in Michigan without acknowledging Chairman Dingell. But he was fortunate — they were going to have a baby and it was going to be a little girl. But it’s said — it’s a lot like the Senate bill. SENATOR REID: Mr. So as they also say in Detroit, again, we think we have a better idea. But most people haven’t heard about that. My mother, who was self-employed, didn’t have reliable health care, and she died of ovarian cancer. We also talk about how we can help to make the Medicare system more effective and provide better quality care. That’s what the American people are looking for. But combined with six others and six more and six others, they’d get us in the right direction. We had the best senators we’ve got working on that in a bipartisan way. And unfortunately over the course of the year, despite all the hearings that took place and all the negotiations that took place and people on both sides of the aisle worked long and hard on this issue and — this became a very ideological battle. You know, I was looking through some of the past statements that people have made, and I think this concern is bipartisan. You talked about stories — Senator Alexander did, too. Our country is too big, too complicated, too decentralized for Washington, a few of us here, just to write a few rules about remaking 17 percent of the economy all at once. Senator Moynihan said that many years ago, and that’s what we have to do here today. So this is the only place, the Senate, where the rights to the minority are protected and sometimes, as Senator Byrd has said, the minority can be right. After you spend $2,000 approximately in medication, you are finished until you spend $3,500 more out of your own pocket. Across America, more than 60 percent of Republicans, Democrats, and independents want us to reform the way health care works. But I just hope that as we sit around this table, we understand the urgency that the American people have about this issue, how it affects not only their health but their economic security. They want to know what this means to them. Again, Lamar, you’re entitled to your opinion but not your own facts. And that’s to take many of the examples that you just mentioned about health care costs, make that our goal — reducing health care costs — and start over, and let’s go step by step toward that goal. Is it any wonder? They want it so that businesses can afford health care. We’ve still got a long way to go. As controversial as the efforts to reform health care have been thus far, when you ask people, should we move forward and try to reform the system, people still say yes, they still want to see change. I don’t know that those gaps can be bridged. President, renounce this idea of going back to the Congress and jamming through on a bipartisan — I mean, on a partisan vote through a little-used process we call reconciliation, your version of the bill. It means working together the way General Marshall and Senator Vandenburg did. Last Monday, a week ago Monday, all over America, results were run from a poll done by the Kaiser Foundation. They did some surgery on the baby; he was happy — that is, Jesus was happy — until he got his mail four months later, opened the envelope, and the insurance company said, “We didn’t realize that your baby had a preexisting disability. Imagine an economy where people could change jobs, start businesses, become self-employed, whether to pursue their artistic aspirations or be entrepreneurial and start new businesses if they were not job-locked, because they have a child who’s bipolar or a family member who’s diabetic, with a preexisting condition, and all of the other constraints that having health care or not having health care places on an entrepreneurial spirit. Chuck, you’ve been working on this a long time. Let me just close by saying this. It was interesting what that poll said: 58 percent of Americans would be disappointed or angry if we did not do health care reform this year — 58 percent. But often they had to persuade me to change my direction to get our state where it needed to go. That’s just not what the Founders intended.” Which is another way of saying that the Founders intended the Senate to be a place where the majority didn’t rule on big issues. He had everything that he wanted, except a baby. And health care reform is entitlement reform. We’ll split it up, and so we’ll let them make some quick remarks. We’ve made our ideas. President, as you know, as a young Congressman gaveled Medicare into law in the House of Representatives. This shouldn’t happen to anyone in America. Number six, House Republicans have some ideas about how my friend in Tullahoma can continue to afford insurance for his wife who has had breast cancer — because she has a preexisting condition, it makes it more difficult to buy insurance. That day, March 5th, we all remember the bipartisan spirit, the hope that was in the room, and also when Senator Kennedy came into the room and declared himself a “foot soldier” in the fight for health care for all Americans. Now, what I did, what the White House did several days ago, is we posted what we think is the best blend of the House and the Senate legislation that’s already passed. It means reducing health care costs — and making that our goal for now, and not focusing on the other goals. We think it is a plan that works with the existing system, the employer-based system, the private health care system, but allows a lot of people who currently don’t have health care to get health care, and more importantly, for the vast majority of people who do have some health care, it allows them to get a better deal. When fully implemented, the bill would spend about $2.5 trillion a year, and it still has the sweetheart deals in it. THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you, Lamar. Now, you’ve presented ideas. Mike Enzi, in the past you’ve put forward legislation around small businesses that are very important. I know you met with some governors just the last few days. The only thing bipartisan will be the opposition to the bill. In our state, half the counties, pregnant women have to drive to the big city to have prenatal health care or to have their baby, because the medical malpractice suits have driven up the insurance policies so high that doctors leave the rural counties. My hope in the several hours that we’re going to be here today, that in each section that we’re going to discuss — how do we lower costs for families and small businesses, how do we make sure that the insurance market works for people, how do we make sure that we are dealing with the long-term deficits, how do we make sure that people who don’t have coverage can get coverage — in each of these areas what I’m going to do is I’m going to start off by saying, here are some things we agree on. “But that’s okay,” he was told. Think of an economy with that dynamism of people following their pursuits, taking risks — we want them to take risks and yet we lock them down, and we have an anvil around their businesses because of these increasing costs of health care. Most of the governors I’ve talked to think that would be a good way to increase competition. When I was elected governor some of the media went up to the Democratic leaders of the legislature and said, “What are you going to do with this new, young Republican governor?” a few years ago. We couldn’t afford it if our employer weren’t helping us do that. He was afraid of what was going to happen. I mean, John Boehner and George Miller did that on No Child Left Behind. And in addition, it dumps 15 to 18 million low-income Americans into a Medicaid program that none of us would want to be a part of because 50 percent of doctors won’t see new patients. Your stories are a lot like the stories I hear. I say to my friend, Lamar, who I have great respect and admiration for, you’re entitled to your opinions, but not your own facts. And if not, at least we will have better clarified for the American people what the debate is about. And that’s exactly what this does with the expansion of Medicare. This legislation is about innovation; it’s about prevention; it’s about wellness. We all know this is urgent. But because people would have some pooling power, the costs overall would be lower because they’d be in a stronger position to negotiate. And General Marshall said that sometimes Van was my right hand and sometimes he was his right hand. We’re going to have Nancy and Harry — I think my understanding is you guys want to split time. As a former governor, I also want to try to represent governors’ views. I mean, we want you to succeed, because if you succeed our country succeeds. And we’ll be saying to the American people, who have tried to tell us in every way they know how — town halls and elections and surveys — that they don’t want this bill; that they would like for us to start over. We’ve got people who are used to solving problems step by step. President, thank you very much for the invitation. Almost all of it. What I will then do is just address — John, are you going to make the presentation yourself? Okay. John Boehner and I have selected Lamar Alexander of Tennessee to make our opening framing statement, and let me turn to him. So it is — it’s a very important initiative that we have to take. That is the single biggest driver of our federal deficit. And if we don’t get control over that we can’t get control over our federal budget. What we do here must be relevant to their lives. But we’d like to start over. We owe it to our country. So, with that, I just want to say again how much I appreciate everybody for participating. And I thank you, Mr. I said at the State of the Union, and I’ll repeat, I didn’t take this on because I thought it was good politics. It came up in the Senate. President, again. Now, in conclusion, I have a suggestion and a request for how to make this a bipartisan and truly productive session. And I am going to now turn it over to Senator McConnell so that he can make some opening remarks. Businesses are having to make decisions about just dropping coverage altogether for their employees. We’ve watched the comprehensive economy-wide cap and trade. He had health insurance. I do remember that. The character of our country has formed the backbone of our country, our working middle-class families in America. And that’s why we said 173 times on the Senate floor in the last six months of last year, we mentioned our step-by-step plan for reducing health care costs. I’d like to begin with a story. It means that from a governor’s point of view, there are going to be what our Democratic governor calls “the mother of all unfunded mandates.” Nothing used to make me madder as a governor than when Washington politicians would get together and pass a big bill, take credit for it, and then send me the bill to pay. And all of us, when I was in the Senate, and all of you as House and Senate members, have good health care. SENATOR ALEXANDER: Thanks, Mitch and John. And these are letters from all across the country, constituents from every walk of life. Right now it’s projected that premiums for families with health insurance — not people without health insurance but with health insurance — will almost certainly double over the next decade, just as they doubled over the past decade. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost. Your opinion is something that is yours, and you’re entitled to that, but not your own set of facts. And I want to say, because Medicare was mentioned, unless we pass this legislation we cannot keep our promises on Medicare. That’s a good start. Later he will inspire us with that, but he, Mr. So I promise not to make a long speech. That’s the way we worked for eight years. John McCain has talked about how rising health care costs are devastating to middle-class families. I have said repeatedly — I said at the State of the Union, I said last night when I was meeting with the Business Roundtable — that in addition to dealing with the immediate challenges we face in the recovery, it’s absolutely critical that we also look at some fundamental structural problems in our economy that are hurting families, hurting businesses, and having an impact on the exploding deficits and debts that the federal government, but also state governments are carrying. It’s affecting not only those without insurance, but it’s affecting those with insurance. President. And if we don’t, then the rest of what we do today will not be relevant. The baby needs a couple more surgeries. And for them, they don’t have time for us to start over. Almost all of the long-term deficit and debt that we face relates to the exploding costs of Medicare and Medicaid. So this bill is not only about the health security of America. Welcome. Here we are today. And it may be that at the end of the day we come out of here and everybody says, well, you know, we have some honest disagreements; people are sincere in wanting to help, but they’ve got different ideas about how to do it, and we can’t bridge the gap between Democrats and Republicans on this. President, with your leadership we passed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act last January and got a running start on some of the technology and scientific advancements in this by the investments in biomedical research, health IT — health information technology — a running start by your signing the SCHIP, the children’s health bill, insuring 11 million children. And then let’s talk about some areas where we disagree, and see if we can bridge those gaps. But I want to talk for a moment about what it means to the economy. My wife has breast cancer; she got it 11 years ago. President, for your leadership in getting us to this place. I mean, what’s fair about taxpayers in Louisiana paying less than taxpayers in Tennessee? And what’s fair about protecting seniors in Florida and not protecting seniors in California and Illinois and Wyoming? So our view, with all respect, is that this is a car that can’t be recalled and fixed, and that we ought to start over. We’d like to do that, and we appreciate the opportunity that you’ve given us today to say what our ideas are, and to move forward. When I go down on the floor — and I’ve been there a lot on this issue — some of my Democratic friends will say, well, Lamar, where’s the Republican comprehensive bill? And I say back, well, if you’re waiting for Mitch McConnell to roll in a wheelbarrow in here with a 2,700-page Republican comprehensive bill, it’s not going to happen because we’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t do comprehensive well. And I can tell you that at least two, sometimes five, of the 10 letters relates to the challenges that people are experiencing in health care every single day. I’d like to say the same thing to you. Senator Byrd, who is the constitutional historian of the Senate, has said that it would be an outrage to run the health care bill through the Senate like a freight train with this process. You had a running start on expanding access, and not only that, but doing it in a way that is of the future. And when you talk to every single expert and you just talk to ordinary people and you talk to businesses, everybody understands that the problem is not getting better, it’s getting worse. Both I and Lamar went a little bit over our original allocated time. So we’ve got to do something.” And that’s about — that’s where we are. And politics I think ended up trumping practical common sense. He had employees that liked him. In each of these cases there are corresponding ideas on the Republican side that we should be able to bridge. And the baby was born, and in just a few minutes after the birth of that baby, he was told that the baby had a cleft pallet. And many of the provisions that are in our bill are initiatives put forth by the Republicans — others of our colleagues will talk about this. I’ve looked at Tom Coburn and Senator Burr’s plan that’s been put out there. You’ve mentioned that yourself. “We can take care of that.” And they did. It means it will cut Medicare by about half a trillion dollars, and spend most of that on new programs, not on Medicare and making it stronger, even though it’s going broke in 2015. And it doesn’t work for most of us. One man in Michigan, Mr. This is not just about health care for America; it’s about a healthier America. In the course of that time in our committees in the House and the Senate, we’ve had lively discussions. He paid his premiums. It means putting aside jamming it through. Let us move in a way — who can say “ram”? We started this six weeks after your inauguration, just six weeks after your inauguration, on March 5th, with you extending a hand of bipartisanship. But what I’m hoping to accomplish today is for everybody to focus not just on where we differ, but focus on where we agree because there actually is some significant agreement on a host of issues. So there are six ideas. And they said, “I’m going to help him because if he succeeds our state succeeds.” And they did that. Our insurance is $2,000 a month. SPEAKER PELOSI: Yes, Mr. We’ve watched the comprehensive immigration bill. When I went home for Christmas, after we had that 25 days of consecutive debate and voted on Christmas Eve on health care, a friend of mine from Tullahoma, Tennessee, said, “I hope you’ll kill that health care bill.” And then before the words were out of his mouth, he said, “But we’ve got to do something about health care costs. You mentioned that in your opening remarks. So put us down on that side of the ledger. And more importantly, we want to talk about — we believe we have a better idea. All right? Nancy. I was trying to think about if there were any kind of event that this could be compared with, and I was thinking of the Detroit Auto Show, that you’d invited us out to watch you unveil the latest model that you and your engineers had created and asked us to help sell it to the American people. We know how to do that and we can do that on health care as well. I am very grateful to all of you because I know how busy you are. And what happens during that hole that we’ve called the doughnut hole? Seniors in America are splitting pills in half, not getting the prescriptions filled, taking them every other day. Senator Byrd in his book — Senator Reid in his book, writing about the Gang of 14, said that the end of the filibuster requiring 60 votes to pass a bill would be the end of the United States Senate. You’ve discussed the unsustainable growth in Medicare and Medicaid in our budget. I’ll get letters from parents who — whose children have preexisting conditions and maybe those children were able to get health insurance when they were young but now they’re growing up, they’re about to move out, and they can’t get insurance no matter what job they find. I remember reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s books, which most of us have read, and he said in his “American Democracy” that the greatest threat to the American democracy would be the tyranny of the majority. But we think to do that we have to start by taking the current bill and putting it on the shelf and starting from a clean sheet of paper. Number five, expanding health savings accounts. And it’s for that reason that last year, around this time, actually, I hosted in the White House a health care summit and indicated to Congress that it was absolutely critical for us to begin now moving on what is one of the biggest drags on our economy and represents one of the biggest hardships that families face. And those people sitting at that kitchen table, they don’t want to hear about process; they want to hear about results. You and I and many other senators worked together on the America COMPETES Act. And we go and you do that and we look at it and we say, that’s the same model we saw last year, and we didn’t like it and neither did they because we don’t think it gets us where we need to go, and we can’t afford it. But remember maybe when you were younger, when you were first starting off — I can certainly remember Malia coming into the kitchen one day and saying, “I can’t breathe, Daddy,” and us having to rush her to the emergency room because she had asthma; or Sasha, when she was a baby, getting meningitis and having to get a spinal tap and being on antibiotics for three days, and us not knowing whether or not she was going to emerge okay. As we sit around this table, I think we should be mindful of what they do when they sit around their kitchen table. THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. What I will then do is just address a couple of points that were raised by you, Lamar, in terms of process, and then we will start diving in and getting to work. And there’s probably nothing that modern medicine could have done about that. And after World War II in this very house in the room back over here, President Truman and General Marshall would meet once a week with Senator Arthur Vandenburg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and write the Marshall Plan. And I think that’s why Lyndon Johnson in the ’60s passed the civil rights bills in Everett Dirksen’s office, the Republican Leader’s, because he understood that having a bipartisan bill not only would pass it but it would help the country accept it. Thank you very much. Accessibility — affordability and accessibility are closely aligned — and accountability for the insurance companies. What I want to do is just make a few brief remarks on the front end, and then we’re going to allow leadership from the both the House and the Senate to make some opening remarks, and then we will dive in. He had health insurance. But I think it’s important to note that if we took all the profits of the insurance companies, the health insurance companies, entirely away — every single penny of it — we could pay for two days of the health insurance of Americans, and that would leave 363 days with costs that are too high. So this is an issue that is affecting everybody. He was too proud to tell his children that he needed help, because they were raising their own families. There’s an 11-page memo on the — I think it’s important for people to understand there’s not a presidential bill. Give states incentives to lower costs, number four. He was at the end of the line in terms of his finances; he might have to lose his home, and she was bedridden. It’s not perfect overlap, it’s not a hundred percent overlap, but there’s some overlap. Some of you know that I get 10 letters, out of the 40,000 that I receive every day, for me to take upstairs to the residence and read every single night. President, my friends in the House and in the Senate, I want to spend a few minutes talking about Nevada, about our country, and not what’s going on here in Washington. And I think everybody here is profoundly sympathetic and wants to make sure that we have a system that works for all Americans. We’re not covering the $90,000 in hospital and doctor bills you’ve already run up.” So he’s trying to pay that off. Senator Pat Moynihan said before he died that he couldn’t remember a big piece of social legislation that passed that wasn’t bipartisan. And we’d like to briefly mention — I’ll briefly mention and others will talk more about it as we go along — what those ideas are, what some of them are, what some of the suggestions we have are. Mike Enzi and Ted Kennedy wrote 35 bills together. We’ve watched the comprehensive health care bill, and they fall of their own weight. His institutional memory of how difficult it was to pass Medicare, how he has worked over the decades to improve it, how committed he is to preserving it, and how important a part of preserving Medicare is to this passing this health care bill. He will explain why it covers more people, costs less, and helps small businesses offer insurance, too, helping Americans buy insurance across state lines. And then, later he wrote to you and said this is not just about the details of policy, it is about the character of our country. Dingell told me that his wife had been sick for a long time. It has more taxes, more subsidies, more spending. I hope that this isn’t political theater where we’re just playing to the cameras and criticizing each other, but instead are actually trying to solve the problem. President. We also have some insurance reforms in there that, for example, prohibit people who have preexisting conditions from being banned from getting coverage. Now, I’m telling all of you things you already know. They have a big stake in it. It’s about jobs. And it means going step by step together to re-earn the trust of the American people. So if we can do that — start over — we can write a health care bill. And Mitch, you’ve said that the need for reform is not in question, and obviously there are comparable studies on the Democratic side as well. We owe it to our seniors. So here’s the bottom line. Mike Enzi, who’s worked on this and partnered with Ted Kennedy on a range of health care issues as a chairman of the committee, you said that small businesses in your home state are finding it nearly impossible to afford health care coverage for their employees. So what that means is, that when it’s written it will be 2,700 pages, more or less, which means it will probably have a lot of surprises in it. Last year obviously was one of the toughest years we’ve had on record, and all of us in one way or another were devoted to focusing on breaking the back of the recession, restoring economic growth, putting people back to work. And so when I look at the ideas that are out there, there is overlap. They’re just six steps, maybe the first six. Under the Medicare law that is in existence, you can be sick and you can get your medication paid for for a while. If they’re not doing that, then the money that they are spending on health care is money that otherwise could have gone to job creation. And those are the kinds of things that I think all parties and both chambers should be able to agree to. I’ve got a doctor right downstairs. Many of them are at the end of the line with their insurance, with their caps, with their — this and that. Mr. Everybody here understands the desperation that people feel when they’re sick. That sort of thinking works in the classroom but it doesn’t work very well in our big complicated country. In each of those instances I remember thinking while sitting in the emergency room what would have happened if I didn’t have reliable health care. I will try to stick to the time because we have many people to hear from. So I’m very much looking forward to working with you on all those issues. Maybe more personally I should just mention the fact that I now have about as good health care as anybody could have. Number three, put an end to junk lawsuits against doctors. We’ve got some people who’ve been working a very long time on figuring out how can we control the huge expansion of entitlements. I’ve looked at those very carefully. It became a very partisan battle. There are good suggestions and ideas on the Web.

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