FOX "Interview With Senator Charles Grassley" - Transcript

Interview

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MS. KELLY: Six-hundred billion dollars of President Obama's first budget going toward changing the way you get your health care, and now many Americans are asking: Will Obama's health care reforms actually end up hurting some here?

Republican Senator Charles Grassley pressed Budget Director Peter Orszag on this exact topic yesterday, at one point, literally pounding the table. Watch.

SEN. GRASSLEY: If we have a national system of health care, it's going to deliver the same thing in Iowa as it does in California, because for 40 years, it didn't.

MS. KELLY: Senator Charles Grassley is a Republican from Iowa and he's the Ranking Member on the Finance Committee. He's my guest now.

Senator, good morning to you.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Good morning, Megyn.

MS. KELLY: You were all fired up yesterday. Why were you so fired up?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, when it comes to the cost of Medicare, if you would take the states from Wisconsin over to Washington State and from Kansas to Canada and if they practiced medicine in the rest of the country like we do in that part of that country, we would be cutting down on one-third the cost of Medicare, in other words, I'm telling you that throughout the rest of the country, the way Medicare pays out and the way they practice medicine, the way they gain the system, they're wasting a lot of money.

MS. KELLY: Right. It costs more according to you than it does in places like Iowa and you're worried that President Obama's plan is going to cut Medicare for Iowans and other people in your region. Is that it?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Yeah. Yeah. We have two kinds of Medicare, traditional Medicare, fee for service and then we've got what you call, Medicare advantage. They've had Medicare advantage in big states like California and New York, Texas, Arizona, Florida, for 20 years and only within the last four or five years have we had it spread it to the rest of the country. And this administration is proposing to cut that. It sounds good competitive bidding and I'm for competitive bidding if it doesn't cut services out of rural America.

MS. KELLY: Right. And the problem is you're trying to get answers from this budget director who came to speak before your committee and his opening -- you were hoping for answers because this is one of the big questions. What's going to happen to seniors? Are they going to get Medicare coverage in places like Iowa? Are you going to cut it? And he starts off his testimony, this Orszag, by saying --

SEN. GRASSLEY: Yeah.

MS. KELLY: You should not expect any definitive answers from me because they're not coming, I mean, when is the time for some real answers, so not just seniors, but Americans can understand exactly how their health care coverage will change under Obama's plan?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, right now, it would be the time for those answers. Now, there's a good and a bad aspect of what he just said. The good aspect of it is that the president is not going to make the mistakes, so that's a bad aspect that could happen that Clinton did. He brought a plan to Congress that took him a year to develop it. When it got there, it was almost dead on arrival.

This president is willing to work with Congress, and hopefully, Congress works in a bipartisan way so we can develop our own plan to get something passed. That's the good news when he didn't have answers to the questions. The bad news is we kind of need to know where this president is coming from if he's going to have input because it helps us plan to a greater extent.

MS. KELLY: Many got fired up because Orszag tried to give you what you called the lecture on capitalism, I'm telling you, you had your Wheaties yesterday morning.

What was the problem there? What did he do that made you upset?

SEN. GRASSLEY: Well, listen, you know, there's 23 of us on the committee. You have five minutes to ask questions and you don't want somebody like he did taking two and a half minutes to lecture me about capitalism. I had that in Economics 101 when I was a freshman in college.

So I want answers to my questions.

MS. KELLY: Understood, and well, hopefully, at some point, you're going to get them.

Senator Grassley, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on.

SEN. GRASSLEY: Thank you.

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