Transcripts For MSNBCW The Cycle 20131024 : vimarsana.com

0 liked to have had more testing. we made the government aware of our concerns. you saw in the lead-in, we would have preferred to have months, not days. nevertheless, krystal, this is a problem we see off and on with government contracting. they walked away, we found out today, with $375 million between all of them. they got paid. their work is subpar. for a job well done, luke. we don t know where the blame goes. this just goes back to the contracting we ve seen from the u.s. government over the years. we saw a lot of horrific contracting during the iraq war, horrific contracting before that. that s the big issue here. how come the government can never hold these contractors accountable or get it right? absolutely right. luke russert, much appreciated. take care. jonathan cohn is senior editor at the new republic. we re going to dig into the details of the health care exchange itself, but i wanted to start with the bigger picture question, the more philosophical question. back in september before we even had the government shutdown and the debt ceiling hostage situation, americans faith and trust in government was already at near record lows, according to gallup. all three branches of government near record lows with the legislative branch unsurprisingly being at the lowest. i mean, doesn t such a botched rollout as this website just further undermine americans trust that the federal government can do anything well? unquestionably. i think that s one of the real great losses here and why you hear a lot of liberals as upset as conservatives. this was a test case. can the federal government take on a complex task? and in this instance, i don t think it did a very good job. nobody i know thinks it did a very good job. there were management failures up and down the chain of command. as a result, we have a website that s very important to the functioning of the new health care law, and it doesn t work, or it s working very poorly. now, you know, there s time to fix it. hopefully they will fix it. there are lots of things the government does right, but the next time conservatives say, hey, you know, we don t have faith in the government, look what happened with healthcare.gov, you re going to have to say, yeah, you know, in that instance, you re right, it did a lousy job. now, no surprise you have democrats speaking out against the website. first read said today one of the chief reasons why democrats won the fight over the shutdown was obviously the party s impressive unity. you had democrats all standing together, whether it was the white house, blue state members, or red state members. we re now seeing that same unity does not exist when it comes to the website. for example, you have senator joe manchin as one democrat who is drafting legislation to delay the first year of penalties to folks who don t have insurance. it s one thing for republicans to be fighting against this, but now having pressure from democrats, how does that up the heat, i guess, for the administration to make some necessary changes? right. well, you re going to see, i think, anxiety levels on the democratic side of the aisle rise the longer this takes. on the other hand, you know, there s still some time. i think democrats will hold it together. i think democrat believe in this law. they believe in what this law is supposed to do. the problem is the website suspect letting people get access to this insurance they desperately need. let s fix the website. i think everyone s aware the republican motives here are not exactly pure. they re holding these hearings not because they want to fix obama care. they re holding these hearings because they want to get rid of obama care. so i think there s some patience there. you know, either the website has to be working within a few weeks or the administration has to come up with some other ways to make this work. there are the proverbial break the glass plans. there are work arounds, there are alternatives. you know, jonathan, there s two things going on. one, obviously, you have some problems with the website that we ve been covering and need to be fixed. you ve got republicans, as you say, disingenuously attacking that. but there s a media piece here too. i think the media gravitates towards some simple stories. broken website is a very simple story to tell. the fact that 60% of the poorest americans are in states where john roberts created an escape hatch for republican governors to opt out of medicare despite 90% funding is a horror story to tell. we did a segment on it this week because we think it s important. there s that aspect. another hard part of this is something you wrote about. speak to the fact that at the state level we ve seen that the most critical period for enrollment is not typically the period we re in right now but comes later. i know you had a chart on that. yeah, i mean, the media does gravitate to the easy, the quick story. now everybody is suddenly looking for these enrollment numbers. i think some people expect we should have a stock ticker running across the bottom of the screen every day. oh, someone signed up for obama care. ten people signed up for obama care. that s not the way it works. if you look at massachusetts, which implemented a set of reforms just like these. it s really the best model we have. almost nobody signed up at first. people waited. it makes sense. we have your chart up on screen where people can see the big red part at the end is more later near the deadline, not what would be right now. right. i mean, why would you pay now for an insurance policy that doesn t start until january 1st? that s true if you have private insurance from an employer. ask a human resources benefits person at a company. when does everybody sign up for open enrollment? they do it on the last day. so this is one of the stories i think people need to keep in mind. don t get hung up on the enrollment numbers, whether they re good or bad, frankly. the rush will come towards the end, towards the last minute. the question is whether the system is reasonably functional, fully functional by that point. that s absolutely right. people are procrastinators by nature. of course they re not going to be signing up right away. i wonder if the president at some level is saying, i wish we had done single payer after all. but i want to turn the corner and talk about something else the president is trying to push. immigration. he was up this morning talking about immigration, trying to drive the narrative more toward that. the business community is pressuring republicans to get on the page with the president on this because the farming industry, the restaurant industry, and the hospitality industries in particular see the value this could do as well as anybody who sees the value of allowing 11 million people to pay more in taxes and to spend more as consumers. the tremendous value to america. so what is the likelihood, do you think, that we re going to get comprehensive immigration reform, say, i don t know, pick an arbitrary deadline, before the cardinals win the world series. which hopefully will be a long time from now. i know you re a red sox fan. you re right. look, this is one of those you look at the fundamentals and think this should have been ages ago. all the interest groups are lined up behind it. you know, democrats are willing to compromise. they ve come to the table. the republicans, this is in their long-term interest. i know they ve been told this by everybody. but if they don t get behind immigration reform, it s going to be a really long time before they win a presidential election. so you would think this would have happened already. that s totally true, but jonathan, as you well know, they ve spent over a decade demagoguing against this. it s a little bit hard for them to do a 180 now that they see their electoral future is in trouble. right. so the answer is, i don t know when it s going to happen. it should happen. at some point i would imagine the pressure on speaker boehner, on the house republicans from their business groups, even from evangelical groups will become enough, it will become overwhelming. they ll look at their disapproval ratings. they ll look at those demographic numbers and dd, you know what, we need to bite the bullet and do this. if you asked me, it would have been happened a year ago. i m surprised it didn t happen already. if it didn t happen already, it s hard for me to say when it will happen. all right. well, we ll keep the hope and remain optimistic. jonathan, thank you very much. thanks for having me. up next, the website is not the only thing that has the white house under pressure today. some of america s closest allies are personally dialing up the president to ask, hey, are you spying on me? we ll be dialing up the spin as the cycle rolls on for thursday, october 24th. 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