The problems associated with the new health care website. And a rally protesting the nsas surveillance program. We want to welcome back to congressman fred upton, chairman of the energy and Commerce Committee. Politico andof Siobhan Hughes of the wall street journal. Siobhan, go ahead. What was your take away from the hearing yesterday . Where will you go from here . Will you issue subpoenas . , we wantedy sebelius her to come last week. She chose not to. Other scheduling conflicts, she said. We have her coming next week to chi will give us at least three hours. There will be a lot of questions. There was a line that was on the front page of your paper, i dont remember the byline. It was like a lot of fingers and no palm. A lot of fingers pointing as to who the blame is. We need to get to the bottom of this. This has not been a story just in the last week or so. We started our investigation last summer. We heard testimony earlier this year, a good number of letters as well. The administration has spent, as you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on this rollout. Even though they said they were ready to go and would be ready october 1, it seems like it was so compartmentalized. Different players at every little segment. They did not do the ned end to a weekting prior or two before october 1. We know the real troubles that are out there. I was on a phone call this past week with some radio folks back in michigan. One of the announcers, in fact, had gotten the notice for him. His Health Insurance was canceled. Of course, that breaks the first promise. If you like your Health Insurance, you can keep it. Was told he had to sign up for the Affordable Care act, obamacare, and was totally frustrated trying to get online. We have a lot of questions. Just a quick followup. Who was responsible . Do you take the contractors word that it was really cms responsibility . And,ey all pointed at cms in essence, the administration. We will get to the bottom of this. The ways and Means Committee cms. Be chairing with we will be having secretary sebelius on wednesday. I think we learned a lot earlier this week. We have a lot of questions for them to find out who made the decision, why if they knew it wasnt going to work, why wasnt it delayed . The president made the decision back last summer on the business mandate side of things. We had a vote on the individual side. And the deadline stayed in place. We have a real mess on our hands. You heard a lot, like you said. Do you think its the government, the contractors . From what youve heard so far, and thats a good deal, who is really this wasas supposed to be a userfriendly service. The promise was you could help keep your Health Insurance if you wanted it. You are forced into this new program, this new design. It was described by everyone as if youre born going to order pizzas or flowers or whatever. It does not work. Thats the easy part. Signing up ought to be the easy part, anyway. The hard part is when those same folks need some type of medical care next year, when it is in place. Whether or not that registration really carries through to the Doctors Office or the hospital, how are they going to get reimbursed, what are they going to do for fraud and abuse that arise in the system they said it would be on time, ready to go, spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do it, but the proof is in the pudding. Who is to blame . I think that the way that it was set up, it seems like there was otherrall Program Manager than the department of hhs. They are going to kathleen sebelius, the secretary, is going to have to answer through that for that when she comes to testify. Deliver they said they did. They said we did what we said we would do. But the way that it was just alled, it was these pieces together that then were never tested. In the end, thats where the real problem came. And when they did test it, it was a small number of testing. It still crashed. Somewhere, someone should have decided, you know what, this is not ready for prime time, we have to have a new date. Find that out next week. So, they earned their 292 million . I dont know. One of my colleagues said, ive heard everything but an apology. It is a pretty substantial sum of money. You can imagine as the administration is working to fix this 24 7, bringing in all these different teams we dont necessarily know who they are what that bill will end up eating being at the end of the day. This. Have got money from you have hampered hhs and cms ability to do this. How do you respond . A 2 billion slush fund. That is where a good number of these dollars came from. It does not seem like they have cut any money from trying to sign people up. It is just ineptness in terms of where things are. And when you look at the changes on obamacare, even the president , of course, refers to it that way, so it is not meant as a slight in any way, he has made a number of changes. He has dismissed or given a one year delay for the business mandate. With all the evidence piling up that this was a disaster, they should have looked at a year delay as well. Hearingince we had our thursday this last week, there is a number of members am a republican and democrat, that are calling for delay in terms of there is a number of members, republican and democrat , that are calling for delay. We will take a look at that. It sounds like theres something there. We are going to be looking at this. You will remember that in the house last summer, the end of july, when the president made his announcement that the business mandate would be delayed, we thought, whats fair is fair. It ought to be on the individual side as well. We had a vote. Almost every republican voted for it. A good number of democrats voted for it as well. Manchin,ansion senator shaheen they have been calling for delays, too. On the penalty, you are talking about . There will be some discussions in the next few days. It sounds like something is happening behind the scenes. It is not done. We have identified and highlighted some real trouble. Certainly, real frustration with signing up for this plan as well. A number of tv shows in the last couple of days have brought in people to try and sign up and cannot do it. We did it yesterday at the hearing. A couple of our colleagues turned on their ipad and got a complete blank screen. People were told to call in a couple of days. , i presume,pened hundreds of thousands of to hundreds of thousands of folks across the country. They are being forced out of their present insurance plan, told to sign up for this and cannot do it because of the failure of the system to operate. You think the penalty should be the white house announced there would be a sixweek delay, i think . That is under the guise that they will get their act together pretty soon, right . Im not so sure that happens. You mean you might go beyond oversight and there might be legislation . We will see. Discussions are starting. We learned a lot this last week. We are going to learn more, i presume, this next week. This is peoples. It is a lot of money out of their own pocket. A lot of changes. Where this leads, time will tell. Try to we are going to take the evidence that we saw this week and see what adjustments we might be able to make, particularly since some of the headlines friday in politico democratlmost every with a tough race said weve got big trouble. How active should we expect the energy and Commerce Committee to be . Are we talking about hearings every week . Preview what it will look like. First of all, theres a couple of committees that have jurisdiction. It is not just us. Dave camp and ways and means will have cms come testify on tuesday. We have darrell issa, the government reform committee. I dont know what precisely is going on in the senate. We are going to continue our oversight role, as we should. We have two subcommittees with jurisdiction, our Health Subcommittee and the oversight subcommittee. A lot of questions are raised related to the security of the individuals information that they put into the system as well, knowing that they are changing the number of lines to make it work. There are a lot of issues that are out there. I dont know that we will do it hearing every week just on this. Weve got a lot of other issues as well, whether they be energy, telecommunications, trade, etc. There is only so much time in the day. With my bill years ago to add daylight savings time, that gave us an extra hour. Hour. We may need extra weeks to try to pour through this mess that togot in front of us pour over this mess that weve got in front of us. Then we heard at least one side say we have heard at least one side say, not my job. They were under oath. They were a little careful in terms of how they answered the questions. Really, there was a communication breakdown between the contractors clearly, there was a communication breakdown between the contractors and the administration in terms of where they were. My question was, and i did not get a straight answer, did you just not know that it was going to work, or did you know that it wasnt going to work and not tell us . What is the answer . In essence, they said, we thought their little section of it work. But no one was in charge of the whole string. As a consequence am a though they all professed as a consequence, though they all professed a month, six weeks ago it was going to go fine, they really didnt know that because they didnt put the pieces together. That is what is sad. We just came out of these two fiscal crises. I know you are probably looking forward to another fiscal crisis january. Really looking forward. I am. Should House Republicans should House Republicans take off the table a shutdown down because of obamacare . I have heard both leaders, mcconnell and boehner, indicate they dont expect that to happen. I think we can come to an agreement prior to january 15. Paul ryan, of course, is helping to lead a conference between republicans and the mcgrath in the house and Senate Republicans and democrats in the house and senate to try to iron out the differences. There are a lot of differences between the two. I read yesterday that he had certainly taken the tack that we were not going to be raising taxes. That was the line in the sand. He is looking at the sequester, the thread of the sequester, which kicks in in january again, a second round. Everyone wants to talk about that. That could be the pressure to try to get an agreement so that we do not have a shut down come january 15. If i was going to vegas, i would bet that we are not going to have a shut down january 15. There were no winners. There were only losers. I say that with a really straight face. I think you will see all sides do their very best to make sure we dont go through january what we went through in october. The fundingays of obamacare over of defunding obamacare over . I dont think thats going to be on the front burner. Does that mean it was a tactical error . There were a number of us who did not agree with that tactic. I was one. It was ultimately used to try to get negotiations started between the different forces. Because we came to a final agreement, even though it took much longer than any of us , it ultimately happened. But it was a mess. I was one of the 87 who voted to end the mess. Will we see a healthcare alternative bill this congress question mark Charles Krauthammer this congress . Charles krauthammer said that paul ryan would put one out in 2014. There are a lot of different ideas. Our committee, are House Republicans have met for a good number of hours in the last number of months our committee, our House Republicans have met for a good number of hours in the last number of months. This is a 2000page bill. Was the president did simply deny the regulations being written. That is how he delayed the business mandate. We took an early provision that was bipartisan early on to take 737. Ence on page it would require that every business that had a 200 dollars transaction annually was going to have to file a 1099 form with the irs. At t said, can you imagine just . He cell phones with us that is millions of 1099s. We ended that provision. That was bipartisan. We came within very close of repealing the medical device tax. Ive got a big company in my district, almost 95 million they would pay. That was a bipartisan idea to. Nd that to end that i think you will see a number of different ideas. One of the ideas we would we talked about come a should there not be a delay in the individual mandate one of the ideas we talked about, should there not be a delay in the individual mandate . To get them done, they have to be bipartisan. What are some other ideas . I have not talked specifically to paul about his proposal, but the idea of allowing folks to purchase insurance across state lines. I think there is almost universal support. I often hear defenders of obamacare talk about folks should not be discriminated against if they have a pre existing condition. I think you have universal support, almost, for that. Same thing for children 25 or 26 being under their parents policies. I think that is a given. Tort reform that is something the president talked about early on when he was first elected. Pretty substantial savings if you can get Something Like that done. A lot of roadblocks that we have seen in the past. There are ideas. This is not a perfect bill, for sure. By almost everyones estimation. And shouldnt we go back and look and examine where these flaws are and see what we can do to fix them . . What about waiving penalties is there a point that you have to if it isnt fixed . I would like to think that has some bipartisan, generous support. A point was made in the hearing this week about some of the they werearly on, that e part of part d, a Prescription Drug benefit of medicare. Program. A voluntary you were not forced into it. That was your decision. You had a number of different choices. Most states offer a good number of different choices if you want to participate in that or not. I think that would be one bipartisan way. I think it would have some pretty good support. Have you talked to democrats about that . We are just starting. We had some other things that occupied us here for a couple of weeks. I am glad we had the hearing when we did. Be iiscussions will think there will be a lot of discussions in the weeks ahead about different ways of fixing problems that are clearly there. Someone who has been in washington for quite a few years not long enough. Of people talk about the rebranding of the republican party. How do you think that is going . Lets face it, the last couple weeks were pretty rough. The polls would show more so on republicans than democrats, but we have to govern. That is what john boehner wants. We are going to have the oversight role on lots of different things. We have the house, the democrats have the senate as well as the white house. To get things done with this divided government, we have to Work Together in a bipartisan way. If you actually look at what we have done in our committee, whether he be health care, energy, a number of different things, whether it be health care, energy, a number of different things, we have had some pretty good bipartisan results. I have sat down with senator wyden a couple of times. They are looking soon at the senate at moving in an Energy Efficiency bill. We have some pretty early bipartisan support in the house, too. I have talked to senator wyden. If they are able to move their bill soon, we will take it up in our committee and move with regular order, open process. We have done some hydro electric bills. We have done some good health bills. We have fixed the sgr, the reimbursement for physicians under medicare. That was a threeyear process. That out of our committee, every republican and every democrat. Frankly, if you look at the last congress, our committee, we had 88 bills pass. They came through our committee and passed on the house floor. 40 of them got signed into law. The Pipeline Safety bill that was sent to the house, voted out of two committees. The president signed it into law a year ago. It upgrades the Safety Standards for every new oil and gas pipeline built in the country. Those are some pretty good things that we have been able to move. Moved a major Water Resources bill. I think there are three people that voted against it. That is the type of thing that we need to be doing. Working together, solving the nations problems in a thoughtful way. Certainly, im committed to doing that as chair of the energy and Commerce Committee. We have time for a couple more questions. I want to ask you about Pipeline Safety. There was a headline about a spill this past week. It was not discovered by the pipeline company. It was discovered by the farmers. I read that story. It has brought up a lot of concern about Going Forward with the keystone xl pipeline. The regulations for old pipelines are such that there are no real standards from the agency that is supposed to monitor them. They are regulated on areas where it is environmentally sensitive or there is a large population, but not in remote areas. A couple things. We had a bad spill in michigan a couple years ago that just that was just outside my district. New to being the chairman of the committee. I said we need to upgrade these standards. We had a number of hearings, brought in all the stakeholders. What can we do to ensure safety . We had millions of pipeline millions of miles of pipeline. There are lots of ways to transport oil and gas and other hazardous things. Pipelines have a pretty good safety record. But we knew they could be better. Which is why i teamed up with a major democrat and former chairman of my committee to the two of us shepherded the former chairman of my committee. The two of us shepherded the bill through with dozens of standards. One of which was that when a pipeline company, under the old standard, they had to report in a timely manner when they had a spill to the federal regulatory agencies. What does that mean . It was literally a day were two before the word came out a day or two before the word came out. When aa number of things pipeline goes under any type of major river or stream. Instead of being just trenched. Sayaw a spill i want to it was at