Heidi Alexander: “this is St. Patrick's Day, as Reverend Austin mentioned, and we celebrate that. We are coming up on another important…”

“this is St. Patrick's Day, as Reverend Austin mentioned, and we celebrate that. We are coming up on another important anniversary, and that is the anniversary of the enactment of the health care law, which the majority regards as a historic achievement and most Republicans regard as a historic mistake. I want to talk a little bit about that law, but there is another anniversary I remember very well that came a few days before enactment of the health care law--the so-called health care summit that was held at the Blair House. It was a remarkable event. The President of the United States, who is highly intelligent and well-versed on health care, invited a bunch of us down to discuss health care. He stayed and we stayed for 6 or 7 hours. During that discussion, it was a pretty free exchange. I especially remember one of them. I had been asked by Senator McConnell and Representative Boehner to represent Republicans in presenting our side, and the President's invitation gave us a platform we usually don't have. He has a better platform than we do most of the time. We made our argument that we would prefer an approach on health care that instead of expanding the health care delivery system, which we all know costs too much, we should go step by step to reduce the cost of health care so more people can afford to buy insurance. That was the basic discussion we had. We got down to some facts.…”