On friday, the house passed a bill that would allow Health Insurance companies to sell health plans through 2014 that do not meet the minimum requirements under the Health Care Law. That vote took place just a day after president obama proposed changes that would allow people who received cancellation notices to keep their plans for another year. Next, a roundtable discussion from this mornings washington journal about the future of the Health Care Law in light of the actions by congress and the president. Two publications represented on the sunday roundtable. Michael warren, the staff writer for the Weekly Standard, and paul walden, thank you for being with us. I wanted to get with you because you have this memo to democratic chicken little, the sky is not falling. The headlines focusing on the beginning of the end when it comes to domestic agenda items. I think we have the tendency to believe whatever is happening right now is going to be that way forever. You might remember a couple of months ago people were saying that the fact that barack obama couldnt get a vote on his proposal to have the action against syria and his presidency was crippled. Then we had the shutdown. People were saying the republicans were never going to win another election again. Now people are saying that, you know, Barack Obamas presidency is over. The fact that it has three years left in it. People need to take a deep breath. Yes, he certainly is a critically a poor moment for obama and the democrats. Theres no question. There are a lot of problems that are coming out about the Affordable Care act. But its a long time before the next congressional election, the next president ial election. Theres a lot thats going to happen between now and then. But you kind of reverted to the way things have traditionally been, which is that democrats in congress tend to be fearful and ready to react instantly to any kind of momentary dip in the polls. Thats why you saw the democrats in the house for the proposal to basically gut a good portion of the Affordable Care act. Because theyre under the missed impression, i think, that that will protect them if things dont go well. Is it that or a reelection plan as sometimes referred to for the democrats. Theyre under the mistaken belief that somehow this vote was going to inoculate them if the Affordable Care act doesnt go well. Keep in mind, the things theyre talking about now. What people are going to get insurance on the exchanges, that all happened on january 31. This is in a great sense sort of the preseason. And you wouldnt say, well, the cowboys lost their first preseason game and therefore the whole preseason is a disaster. And i think that ultimately the law is going to work or its not. And that will be the thing that determines the political effect, particularly on democrats. Once those plans are in operation. Once premiums are stabilizing, going up, going down, many people who have insurance that didnt have insurance, those are the things the practical success of the law that are going to determine if it was a good idea or not. Not what happened with the website before things launched for good. You anticipated the ebb of the flow of the news cycle. After the train wreck, what would the republicans offer to replace obama care. The public outrage will grow. Democrats will begin to affect some of them. But what is the alternative . Democrats will say, okay, whats your plan . Thats exactly right. Thats the point of the piece that this is happening faster than anybody in washington and particularly republicans and congress ever expected. Its the point about whats going to happen. Will the law stabilize will they stablize the premiums and will the law start to work . I dont think thats actually whats going to happen. Republicans arent anticipating thats whats going to happen. Were looking at 5 of the Health Insurance market as being affected directly by the implementation. But we havent seen what happens, for instance, with Small Businesses when the shop program, thats the Small BusinessHealth Option program or something to that effect goes into effect. Its effectively the market for Small Businesses. Thats going to be another giant chunk of people who are going be thrown into this law who are going to come to higher premiums. And thats what youre seeing so many 39 democrats affected on the upton proposal. I think the president had not come out on thursday and made the administrative fix, you would have seen more democrats. Youre talking maybe 60 or 70 democrats affected in the house on this. You still have the democrats in the senate for their own proposals. Up from 2014 from louisiana. She had this proposal. She since pulled back since the administrative fix. But the difference here, i think, from the 2009, 2010 for the president is that back then, you had all sorts of public pressure against the Health Care Law. You have the special election in 2010. Everybody thought this was going to stop. And democrats held together. Democrats pushed this through and made it law. Youre not seeing that anymore. And i think in the last three years, the difference is president oh what doesnt have the public trust that he had in 2009 and 2010. He doesnt have that coalition that was able to push forward obama care through congress in 2010. Its just not there anymore. And people are looking beyond obamas presidency. I want to come back to the specifics of health care. But a question for both of you. Because johnson had vietnam, nixon had watergate. Reagan had iran contra, clinton had impeachment. You look at the second term president s and a book written about second term curses, is this a key moment. Is this compatible to what weve seen with past president s in their second term s . The answer is you have to wait and see. There are three years left in his presidency. As i said before, there are lots of reasons to think that this thing is going to work out okay. This what started this was the problem with the website. Thats disastrous for a lot of reasons we can talk about. But ultimately, theyre going to fix it. Thats a manageable practical problem. But if its not fixed by the end of this month, then what . If thats not fixed . Well, they will end up extending the open Enrollment Period to give people a couple of months to sign up. Its not like the sky is going to fall on december 1 if the website is not perfected. So there are ways to handle that, to extend it a little bit. And so the question then is over time as this thing gets rolled out, you know, what is it the overall effect, how do people think about it . For example, weve gotten very, very caught up in thinking about those people who are in the individual market who have gotten these cancellation notices from their insurers. Thats a pretty small subset of the bob yue lags as a whole and people who are directly affected. The reason we havent spent a lot of time going and interviewing people who say didnt have insurance but can get medicaid. Those are lots of stories as well. Perhaps theyre told, maybe they wont be told. But in is a law that had a lot of practical effects on people at all levels, not just this sort of we kind of made these particular individuals who have these limited insurance plans that they want to keep and just as an aside, if you have one of those plans and you like it, its probably because you never had to use it. I think thats another issue. We got focused on a small group of people. And frankly, the news media is fickle and theyre going to start to lose interest in that story telling you the supposed Horror Stories of the people who are now going to have to get a different insurance plan. Theyll start telling different stories. Perhaps premiums will go up, maybe they wont. Premiums had been increasing in the last couple of years but at the lowest rate in a long, long time. There are good news in the market, generally. Those things in the coming couple of years is going to determine how we look at it. Everything went to hell that was a real disaster. We may look at it as a time that we got excited we might work out fine the same way Medicare Part d did. Is this a defining moment for the president . As you look at the arc oh it was last 50 years and the problems of the president s based in this country, is it comparable . Well, i think if you look at specifically obama care as sort of the enter piece for the obama presidency, right, president obama sort of represented a new type of liberalism, or a return to an older type of liberalism that had been jetsoned in the clinton years. Thats a big liberalism. It says we can do big things with government and get things done. The problem has been for obama is that he admitted as much in the thursday press conference where he was talking about the website and talking about the troubles that that the difficulties of whether that comes with buying insurance. Buying insurance is figuring out whats difficult. More so than any republican or commentator could make with a damning critique of his own vision of government, of his own vision for what his presidency was supposed to be like. But as paul said, yes, this could all go away. The news media might move on to other things and find stories interesting. I dont think its going away. January 1, say that somebody goes to the doctor after january 1 and realizes, well, wait a second. Theyre not in my network. They were before, but because of the disruption of the Insurance Market, they havent they ear no longer in my insurance i have to pay full price and no copay, well hear a slew of stories about people losing their dorks, even though they were told they could keep their doctors by the president and by democrats before november 15. If this mandate isnt eliminated, a lot more people will get the same type of letters as those in the individual Insurance Market are receiving now. Staff writer for the Weekly Standard has been in publication for the last few years. A contributing editor for the american prospect. Hes a graduate of Swathmore College and earned his doctrine. Mike takes aim at my question earlier saying this minor glitch saying this doesnt quite rank with the former president s missteps. Were backing out of war, for example. Got a point . Sure. Keep in mind, there are millions of people who are going to be positively affected on january 1. You can run down the list of the Obama Administration often do. There will be millions of people who are getting medicaid or subsidies. People who had preexisting conditions and couldnt get insurance. But then will be able to get insurance. There are a lot of positive stories they can tell too. And the question is whether or not those are positive stories which are in some cases life transforming are more important than the person who was on a very cheap plan that they kind of got cherry picked in that individual market and now has to get a plan thats more comprehensive and may cost a little more. Is it that way in peoples mind . A lot of it has to do with how the stories get told. Its true. Any problem that anyone has with health care is going to get blamed on president obama. People are going to find themselves getting sick and some cases, even dying under obama care. And the reality is that thats going to end up getting blamed on him too. Right now, were talking about decisions that are insurers who make, private actors in a marketplace. Those are all blamed on obama care. And thats something that the republicans are going to keep trying to do to encourage people to blame anything that goes wrong with the health care on the president. If you take on big reform, you take responsibility. I cant wait for the 2014 democratic blood bath. A beautiful thing to behold. America is awakening to the farce of socialism. Paul joining us from international falls, minnesota on the democrats line. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Im calling you because i am a democrat. Ive been watching this thing from the start. Let me say democrats are going on with the republicans. Youre talking about blue dogs, 99 of them. Theyre democrats, but theyre not. Another thing about it, they lied about this health care since it started. Im 75 years old. Excuse me that i get excited here. This is good for the people who dont have insurance. I spent a lot of money and put the family in a lot of hurt because of not being able to afford insurance. And the Insurance Companies have been robbing us for years and years and years. They still are, they still have their foot in the door. So, please, get the damn thing straight and tell the truth about whats going onif 1. 5 ofo change policy, big deal. Host and quit lying. If 1. 5 of the people have to change policies, big deal . Thats your point . Thanks for calling. I think the caller raises a really good point about the fact that the Insurance Market wasnt a great thing before obama care. And republicans need to recognize that interest for political purposes but for also for good policy. If theyre going to replace something or change something in the Health Insurance policy world, they need to recognize the fact that Insurance Companies arent anyones friend. Anyone who dealt with an Insurance Company knows they can be frustrating and difficult. Republicans and conservatives need to argue that obama care is the long fix for the problem that the caller mentioned is that people didnt have Health Insurance before. Republicans, i think, in congress are getting this idea. They are understanding that its not just sort of a peons to the free market. They have to actually come up with good policy proposals. Thats happening, you know, you have a lot of folks at the wall street journal on thursday. They had a an oped arguing for conservative health care reform. Something is changing here which is that and paul alluded to the fact that anything goes back with health care and Health Insurance in the next few years is going to be blamed on president oh what. Thats a real opening, i this i, for republicans for whom health care has never been a really good issue for them. Now they have an opportunity to make some strides. This is from our Facebook Page greg says this incompetence or misleading. What difference does it make with regard to health care . Ultimately, what makes a difference is whether it works or not, not how you interpret a statement that he made. I want to have folks thinking about people writing in about socialism. Most of the problems that the Affordable Care act is experiencing come from one of the first decisions that they made which was that instead of really radically overhauling the entire Health Care System, they were going to try to maintain the private character of it. All of the people getting cancellations and moving to new insurance, thats private insurance. To you have this incredibly complex system that comes out of the fact that its basically capitalist in nature. You have a lot of different interests with ways to bring money out of the system. A lot of complexity. And so what the Affordable Care act did was it put another layer of complexity on top of all of that complexity. And if they had wanted to make it simple, they could have done something that was more socialistic. You know . We have a Single Payer Health care system in america. Its called medicare. It happens to be the most popular of all of the options. People who are on it love it. Much more efficient than private insurance. Had they wanted to, they could have done Something Like that, could have been a more fundamental reorienting of the system. But instead, they decided it was politically impossible. So they put together a reform that would basically try to undo some of the worst abuses of the private system while maintaining the private character. Thats part of the reason things are so complicated because they put a little more complexity on top of it to try to rein it in. It would have been a lot simpler if it had been socialism. We welcome our listeners. Paul waldman of the american prospect and Michael Warren of the Weekly Standard. We covered some early president ial politicings. Were on the air here in cspan. Among the events in iowa, a fund raiser for the governor whos seeking another term, republican for iowa, among the speakers, congressman paul ryan, the 2012 Vice President ial nominee. A perspective candidate in 2016. Also the chair of the house budget committee. I dont know if you noticed this, but obama care has had a few hiccups lately. Dont you remember, though, we were told we had to pass this bill in order to find out what was in it . Well, here we are. I seem to recall tom, maybe you can jog my memory. As i recall, one of the guys who voted for this law was a guy named Bruce Brayley . You know who that is . Look, this law is doing real harm to real people. This law is making people disrupt their lives. Millions of people are getting cancellation notices. Families are seeing their premiums go up. The crowd that brought us this website where they had three years to prepare, a half a billion dollars to spend, is the same crowd that is now poised to take over 16 of our economy of the health care sector. President obama, though, said he didnt know any of this stuff was going to happen. He said he had no idea these problems were in the offering. We had Kathleen Sebelius come to the committee and say everything was ready to go. Heres the issue if you outlaw the kind of insurance that people actually have, they wont be able to keep those plans. They passed the law three years ago to outlaw the kind of insurance people have and theyre surprised