2008 Polls National Iowa New Hampshire General Election GOP | Dem GOP | Dem GOP | Dem Head-to-Head

---

January 24, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - January 24

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE SPEAKER: It gives us a place to begin a conversation, so that's good, because the president recognized that we need to have quality healthcare for all Americans. He's made some proposals, there are serious problems with them, because again, we're cutting people lose into the private market. We all support individual responsibility, but this plan really is not helpful.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, yesterday, called the planned ridiculous, although he didn't seem entirely clear on its content. We're talking here, of course, about the president's plan to grant a $15,000 tax break on any insurance plan that you either buy or you get from your employer. Now, if your employer were to grant you and insurance policy that's worth more than that $15,000 a year, you would have to pay taxes on the amount above $15,000. That's the essence of the plan.

Some thoughts on all this now from Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent of the Washington Examiner; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call; and Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio -- FOX NEWS contributors all.

First of all Mort, what is this plan intended to accomplish?

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: Well, it's, on the first level, it's intended to level the playing field between people who get their insurance from their employers and you get it tax free -- the employer gets a tax deduction. If you're not insured by your employer and you have to go out and buy insurance in the private market, and that costs an average about $5,200 a year...

HUME: Per individual.

KONDRACKE: For the average family policy that a person who's unemployed -- uninsured gets, costs $5,200 a year. You have to pay that out of your own pocket, you get not tax...

HUME: And you do it with after-tax money?

KONDRACKE: Right. So, they're trying to level the playing field by giving everybody a $15,000 tax deduction...

HUME: So, if you get an insurance plan from your company and it's worth $15,000 or less, you get...

KONDRACKE: You get a refund.

HUME: Or is it just -- I thought you just got the thing you didn't pay taxes on it. That's the way that works.

KONDRACKE: Well, you would get...

HUME: You could only get a refund if pay it out of your pocket, right?

KONDRACKE: Right. But what it -- wait a minute. What it benefits is these people who have to buy the insurance on their own. And they get a tax deduction and, for example, in this average case, instead of paying -- you get your tax deduction at $4,500 if you're a middle income person, so your insurance, instead of costing $5,200, costs $700. That's the great beneficiary. The people who have to -- and everybody else will pay -- will basically get money back except for those, the 20 percent in the -- who have the richest policies, have to -- would not get -- would have to pay extra taxes.

BILL SAMMON, WASHINGTON EXAMINER: For those people it's a tax hike. So, if your company sponsored package is worth more than $15,000, say it's worth $20,000, you're going to pay taxes on that $5,000.

HUME: So, upper income people are going to end up paying more in taxes because they don't get a break on it?

SAMMON: Well, I mean, not necessarily upper income people, people who have more expensive health insurance benefits packages.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: A lot of union people...

SAMMON: Some of these union guys have these gold-plated Cadillac packages, which is one of the reasons why the Democrats don't like it, at least they're saying they don't like because their union guys are squawking they don't don't want to lose these Cadillac packages that they've negotiated with management.

HUME: It's not that they want to lose them, it's that they don't want to have to pay any taxes on them.

LIASSON: But also it might encourage the employers to not offer them.

SAMMON: Yeah, they would either -- because of the plan, they would either have to pay taxes on a portion of it or they would end up having to renegotiate a less expensive...

LIASSON: Less generous plan. Look...

HUME: So, what is the broad effect of this, though, beyond simply the effect on the individual?

LIASSON: The broad effect -- it kind of levels the -- it helps to level the playing field, that's the idea, for people, right now, who don't have insurance because it's prohibitively expensive, get a little bit of assistance to go buy it.

HUME: What about the effect, though, on both the insurance market and the healthcare market? Can somebody answer that question?

KONDRACKE: Yeah, what the administration wants to do is make people, individuals, more possible for their own health insurance, paying their own health insurance and therefore, they think that that will drive -- make people cost-conscious and drive down the cost of health insurance.

HUME: So, if you're an insurance company and you're out there and you know that people can basically get a huge break on a policy up to $15,000...

LIASSON: You're going to offer a lot of them.

KONDRACKE: They'll offer...

HUME: It seems like they'd offer a lot of them and structure them in such a way that they cost that much.

KONDRACKE: Yeah, the problem here, I mean, one objection on the part of the -- of the Democrats is that, in addition to what Bill mentioned is that they want to expand government programs for -- to cover the uninsured. They believe in government, they don't trust this individual market. But there's another reason here. They're afraid of that employers will dump people off into the individual market and thirdly, they want universal coverage. They want everybody in the country covered, 47 million people uninsured right now...

HUME: Now wait a minute -- wait a minute -- wait a minute. Of the 47 million people you claim are uninsured -- of course, Nancy Pelosi expresses this as 47 million people not getting healthcare -- a great many of those people are covered by Medicaid, are they not?

KONDRACKE: These are -- no these are people...

LIASSON: No.

KONDRACKE: ...who do not get Medicaid. These are people who are -- who don't...

HUME: Don't have private insurance

KONDRACKE: Yes, don't have private insurance and they don't get Medicaid either and they don't get S-Chip, these are...

SAMMON: But they get healthcare when the show up at the hospital...

LIASSON: You know, the thing is that the Democrats might want universal coverage, but ever the demise of the Clinton healthcare plan, they have been moving, incrementally, piece by piece, trying to cover children. I think that the interesting thing about the reaction to this is that this is the kind of thing that most health policy people will tell you is a small piece of a bigger solution. That it could be, you know, it's an entry into the debate and maybe with some thinking it could help.

HUME: I mean, except for Max Baucus who says he's going to look into it, and of course he can't go first because it's a tax bill -- has to start in the House...

LIASSON: No, but he's an important Democrat when it finally gets to this chamber.

HUME: Will it ever get there, though? The House Democrats seem to be rejecting it absolutely out of hand. Pete Stark, whose a chairman of a relevant subcommittee of the House says he's not even going to hold hearings on it.

LIASSON: Well, you know, Nancy Pelosi sounded a little bit more open to it today than a lot of the leaders did last night. And I think that, you know, some of these things can be the beginnings of bipartisan solutions and if the Democrats want to build their own healthcare plan, this might have a place in it and it might be helpful. I think it's crazy to dismiss it out of hand.

HUME: When we come back, we'll review the issues and the status of the case in the Scooter Libby trial. Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

EDWARD MCMAHON, JR., FMR CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTY: This whole scapegoat defense that I read about in the paper today, strikes me as a very odd in that regard because if it was an issue of such importance that he was worried about losing his job and that he had to go directly to the vice- president of the United States to discuss these matters, I will guarantee you, sitting here today, that the prosecutor is going to tell the jury that that's precisely the kind of information that you remember very well in your life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Ed McMahon, there, is talking about the Scooter Libby trial in which on -- in the day of opening statements it was alleged that Libby, who's accused of lying and other things in obstructing the investigation into the Valerie Plame leak case, that he believed that he -- his defense said that feared that he was going to be the scapegoat and that Karl Rove was going to be protected and that he was going to be the scapegoat although he as innocent.

As you heard there, a noted lawyer, Ed McMahon, said he doesn't understand that argument -- why they advance that. Why did they advance that?

KONDRACKE: Well one -- I mean, there are a couple of theories about this and nobody know for sure, but one theory is that there is a civil war in the White House. That it's the Cheney gang against the Rove gang that this all a reflection of something that was going on that we didn't know about and its turmoil.

Another theory is...

HUME: And Libby, of course, the top aide to Cheney.

KONDRACKE: Right, it seems more likely to me is that here you have a D.C. jury which is presumably hostile to the Bush administration and Libby is defending himself by pointing fingers at the Bush White House, at Karl Rove, the president's chief political advisor, and trying to show that he was a victim. That seems more sensible to me.

You know, Scott McClellan, the former press secretary, at on stage was asked, is Karl rove involved in this and specifically excluded him and said that Karl Rove was not involved in the leak of this information. I don't know that he as ever asked about Scooter Libby, but he didn't mention Scooter Libby, did not exonerate Scooter Libby and this is basis. The third possibility is that this is Libby paranoia.

SAMMON: The problem scapegoating is that it suggests wrongdoing and if the White House position and Scooter Libby's position up until now is that hey, we didn't do anything wrong, well now they're trotting out this defense of, you know, scapegoating and they're trying to...

HUME: But the facts are, however, are they not, that while Scooter Libby may, at one point, have been afraid that he was going to take the hit and that Karl Rove was going to go free, Karl Rove ended up being the one under investigation and Scooter Libby may have been called to testify about that, but he was not, initially, a target of the investigation.

LIASSON: That's right. And somehow through repeated...

HUME: Rove got investigated (INAUDIBLE).

LIASSON: Yes, and somehow through repeated visits to the grand jury, Rove managed to convince the prosecutor and the grand jury that he did not perjure himself, whereas Libby didn't. And that's what this case is about, whether Libby told the truth under questioning. It's not about whether Libby leak anything, because we already know that he wasn't the person who leaked Valerie Plame's name first, that was Dick Armitage. But, you know, I still don't -- you know, Fitzgerald's case is narrow, it's about prudery and it's -- and it has to meet a certain standard, you have to willfully lie, you can't just say something that's false.

HUME: Now today, we had witnesses who came in -- yesterday and today, to testify for the prosecution. And it turns out, in the course of the cross-examination that they had made inconsistent statements about this, which, apparently, honest problems in memory. You remember things differently and you get refreshed and then it comes to you and so on. Which is presumably what the defense is going to argue happened in the case of Libby. So who, who, who gained from that testimony?

SAMMON: Libby.

LIASSON: Yeah.

KONDRACKE: Libby gains from that because it shows that anybody's memory, under these circumstances can be faulty.

HUME: Bad move by the prosecutor to call his witnesses?

KONDRACKE: Good move by the defense attorneys in the cross- examination.

SAMMON: It also shows that this is a convoluted story about who told which officials, which journalists first and who was -- what order it was. And you know, even Fitzgerald, when he held his press conference at the conclusion of his investigation, got the sequence wrong. He said Libby was the first official to tell the first reporter about this leak. It turned out that Bob Woodward was the first official -- reporter and he got it from a different official, so even Fitzgerald couldn't keep the sequence straight.

---

Sponsored Links

About Us | Contact | Advertise | Privacy Policy         © RealClearPolitics 2006