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Rep. George Miller joined BlogHers for a health care reform discussion that ranged in topic from the public option to pre-existing conditions.
You can listen to the call with Rep. Miller -
You can also read the transcript below:
**start transcript**
Nancy Watzman: Welcome everyone. I’m Nancy Watzman of the Sunlight Foundation representing Blogher today and their community journalism initiative on healthcare policy.
The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency.
As CEO Lisa Stone announced Blogher has been sponsoring a bipartisan series of telephone conference calls to connect women bloggers directly with legislators.
Today on the call we have Representative George Miller. He’s been Congress for 35 years and is Chairman of the Influential House Education and Labor Committee.
He’s a key champion of HR3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act. So let’s begin the call and take some questions. Well actually the Chairman would speak for - introduce himself.
George Miller: All right, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to the Bloghers and I’ll just take a couple of minutes here to kind of outline where we are and then open it up for your questions.
I appreciate the invitation to speak with you. There has been no issue that I have been involved in in my public career in the Congress of the United States that has had more intensity and debated more extensively than the issue of healthcare and healthcare reform.
And I think that overall has been very good for the country. I think it’s been good for the members of Congress to hear from the constituents. I was disappointed at some of the activities that took place this summer with the incredible misrepresentations and the efforts to try to scare Americans away from this bill and keeping members of Congress from, you know, talking with their constituents about what was in the bill.
But I think we’ve passed that stage for the most part and since the August break the leadership and the Chairman of the Committees and Democratic leadership have been meeting on a daily, ongoing, regular basis every day that we’ve been back in Washington with the members of the Democratic caucus, with the members of our Committee, with the members of the various caucuses within our Democratic caucus, with the progressive caucus, the Blue Dogs, the new Democrats, people who are concerned about regional disparities, people who are concerned about public option, no public option.
And those meetings continue today. But I think we’re really coming toward the end of that process for - at this stage which would be to finalize the last remaining decisions on the cost of the bill, some options to pay for it or not.
But - and then to send it off to the Congressional Budget Office where they can give us a score as they’re now doing for - or they will be doing shortly for the Senate bill.
We think that may take as many as ten days for them to do that and then we would - when we have that score if it requires additional changes to be made because of some finding by the Congressional Budget Office we will take time to do that.
Those will have to be scored and then I think we will be ready to introduce a bill that is the product of the three - the work of the three Committees, the Ways and Means Committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee and my Committee, Education and Labor.
We started out with probably about 75 to 80% of the bills being in common from the three Committees and then there were amendments that were offered in the various Committees and we’ve been walking through some of those, and also listening to the members after the August break.
I think the product that we’re going to end up with will reflect the work of those Committees and it will also be consistent with the goals of - that President Obama has laid out.
And some of you are familiar with those. First and foremost of course is in the long history of insurance company discrimination based upon pre-existing conditions to deny either families coverage because of one individual in that family may have a pre-existing condition or to deny an individual coverage because they have a pre-existing condition.
We also are working very hard to introduce competition into that insurance market with the introduction of the public option.
