Heidi Alexander: “in February of last year, we had a fairly extraordinary event at the Blair House here in Washington. The President…”

“in February of last year, we had a fairly extraordinary event at the Blair House here in Washington. The President invited a large number of Members of Congress--must have been 20 or 30 of us around the table. He sat there the whole day, and we sat around the table and we talked about health care. It was called the Health Care Summit. A great many Americans watched that live on television, and because of the Internet and other explosions of new media, they still watch some of the things that were said that day. The reason I know that is because people have come up to me often and talked about an exchange I had with the President of the United States. The issue was about health care premiums in the individual market. Citing a Congressional Budget Office letter, I said to the President: ``Mr. President, respectfully, your new health care law that you propose is going to increase individual premiums.'' He stopped me and said: Now Lamar, let's get our facts straight. You are wrong about that. He proceeded to explain to me why I was wrong and he was right. With all respect, I believe I was right and even just a little year later, what the Congressional Budget Office was saying then, which was that individual premiums would go up as a result of the health care law, the last 17 months have shown that we were exactly right.…”