After the press conference in which President Obama announced his administrative fix to the "you can keep your healthcare" lie, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell interviewed the DNC Chairperson, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to get her reaction to Obama's proposal.
At least that's what Ms. Mitchell tried to do.
For each question Mitchell asked, the DNC Chair seemed to answer a totally different question. It was as if she could only provide a pre-programmed talking point. The MSNBC host grew visibly frustrated as Wasserman Schultz found a way to turn around each question about Obama or the Democratic Caucus into an attack on the Republican Party.
When Mitchell mentioned the President's fix had no teeth, and that the insurance industry had indicated it may not go along with it, the Florida Democrat's reply included Marco Rubio wanting the Senate to do nothing, John Boehner saying behind closed doors that he wants to kill Obamacare, and how the GOP wants people to have lousy heath care:
What we should not do and what is unacceptable is what the Republicans want to do in the Upton bill and that is allow new policies, more policies to be sold past 2013 that say that additional people can have pre-existing conditions and be dropped or denied coverage. That women can be charged double just for being women. That annual caps would be returned so medical bankruptcy was possible. Essentially if you listen to what Marco Rubio said, he said under no circumstances should we work to do anything to fix the affordable care act. John Boehner has literally said in a closed-door session his plan is to target the affordable care act and try to kill it through targeted attempts. So their effort is transparent. They don't want to make sure this law works. They have no interest covering the majority of Americans with quality, affordable coverage and we're going to continue to push to make sure we can implement it.
Andrea Mitchell countered that it didn't matter what the Republicans said, it was the Democrats and White House who caused the problem by messing up the roll out of Obamacare. She asked Schultz if allowing people to keep their plans for a year as the President suggested, would hurt the economics of his signature program.
Ms. Schultz ignored the question and lunched into another attack on the Upton bill, finishing off with:
Keep in mind, we've had people enjoying benefits of this law since 2010, where young adults can stay on their parents insurance until 26, women and seniors can get insurance without co-pay or deductible. Those are the kinds of things Republican are trying to take away and roll backwards on the quality affordable coverage they can get.
With her final question the MSNBC host asked if the House Democratic Caucus was worried about damage to their reelection efforts due to the failed Obamacare launch. This time Wasserman Schultz's response included an attack on those "Republican Tea Party extremists."
I believe the overwhelming majority of Congressional Democrats are going to make sure not only that we vote against the Upton bill tomorrow, but that we continue to press forward. Look, Republicans shut the government down over denying people access to quality affordable health care. Democrats are behind Affordable Care Act, fully implementing it, recognizing this is not an overnight change. It's not like flipping a light switch. This is a major change in our health care system. There are going to be bumps along the way. We could listen to Marco Rubio and do absolutely nothing to deal with the problems that might arise, or we could do what President Obama and Democrats believe we should do and we've done over 200 years when we deal with problems that arise in the law, we work together to solve those problems. When you're a Republican Tea Party extremist and all you want to do is block the President from accomplishing anything and willing to derail the economy just to do that, their efforts to continue to kill the Affordable Care Act are pretty apparent.


