Obamacare Inside Obama's White House

-THEY CHANT:

-Yes, we can!

You and I, we're going to change this country

and we will change the world!

For millions, the election of Barack Obama to the Oval Office

marked a new era of hope.

CHEERING

The young, energetic President was eager to take on

the great challenges of his time.

Our combat mission in Iraq will end.

Now is the time to finally keep the promise

of affordable, accessible health care for every single American.

Let's go get 'em! It's game time.

But change would be harder than Obama had predicted.

Am I frustrated that we're not taking bolder steps?

Absolutely.

He said, "I am President of the United States,

"and I can't make anything happen."

He said, "You know, I don't sleep at night very much."

He called me a name that I hadn't heard before, or since,

and stormed out of the room.

In these four programmes, Barack Obama and his inner circle

tell the story of what happened

when he tried to reshape America from inside a White House

unlike any other in history.

I am temperamentally optimistic...

..and...

tend to take the long view.

In tonight's programme, how Obama sparked a bitter conflict

and risked his entire legacy with one piece of legislation.

This health care bill will ruin our country.

It's time to stop him.

When we go out there, it's going to be shock and awe,

take no prisoners, scorched earth policy...

What else? Carpet bombing, and that's just the first day.

In his first weeks in office,

Barack Obama had to put his bold reforms on hold.

He was fighting off a new Great Depression.

As soon as he could, he brought his team together to decide how best

to use the first Democratic majority in Congress for 15 years.

Hello, everybody!

We're sitting in the Oval Office of the President,

right after the stimulus bill passed,

trying to decide what to do next.

We have what can only be considered as a family fight.

We had all of these bills that had to get done that the

President felt very strongly about. We called them planes and

we were air-traffic controllers, trying to decide

how to land the planes.

The health care cadre really felt that this was

a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

with the Congress composition that we had,

that Democratic presidents had been trying for 100 years to get

this done, hadn't been able to do it and that the time was now.

Some people were advising the President,

because the challenges were so great,

to pull back on the agenda a little bit.

Maybe not do health care.

You were dealt a very lousy hand,

but fighting this recession

and not having it turn into the second Great Depression,

that will be a major accomplishment

and if that's all you accomplish, you've done an amazing thing

for the American people.

My advice was - let's do financial reform first.

More likely to get it, more likely after the stimulus

to be bipartisan than partisan...

and therefore created the context for health care.

My job was to advise him on the politics

and I knew that seven presidents had tried,

seven presidents had failed.

There's a mythology that...

..gets absorbed by politicians about what issues are winners

and what issues are losers.

The conventional wisdom would have been that this is political suicide.

The President stood up and said,

"Look, I just went around the country for two years

"running for President and every single one of you know

"that the right thing to do is health care,

"but you're afraid of it."

I felt it was critical to try.

I thought that not only the political costs,

but more importantly, the moral costs...

..to not trying...

..were just too high.

From the state of Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy.

APPLAUSE

No-one had tried harder than Obama's mentor and friend,

Senator Ted Kennedy.

CHEERING

National health insurance is the great unfinished business

on the agenda of the Democratic Party.

Our party gave social security to the nation in the 1930s...

..we gave Medicare to the nation in the 1960s...

and we can bring national health insurance

to the nation in the 1970s.

CHEERING

30 years later, Kennedy, knowing he had only months to live,

had passed the baton to Obama.

With Barack Obama, we'll break the old gridlock

and finally make health care what it should be in America -

a fundamental right for all, not just an expensive privilege

for the few.

When Obama became President a year later,

he inherited a health care system

where Americans paid for private medical insurance.

The government covered veterans, the old and the very poor.

One in six Americans had no insurance at all.

His senior advisor, David Axelrod,

had experienced the unfairness of the health system.

His daughter Lauren had been ill since she was seven months old.

For 19 years, she had uncontrolled seizures

and when I was a young newspaper reporter,

the treatments and the medication that she cost

weren't covered by my insurance

and we couldn't change insurance because

she had a pre-existing condition,

so I was one of those Americans who almost went bankrupt.

I was paying 10,000 a year

out of pocket on a 38,000-a-year salary.

I knew the health system wasn't working.

It certainly wasn't working for us.

Obama knew it would be unrealistic to create an American NHS.

Instead, he set out to fix the insurance-based system.

It was not a revolution in health care, but a...

..series of reforms that would fill the gaps in health care coverage

in this country.

No more what they call gender rating.

Women were paying 48% more for their health insurance than men.

Insurance companies couldn't deny you health insurance for what

they termed caesarean section as a pre-existing condition,

or even a child birth a pre-existing condition,

or circumstance of violence against women a pre-existing condition.

45,000 people a year were dying

because they did not have health insurance.

Universal coverage and making sure the moral dimension of health care

is dealt with,

don't think that we can get that done without...

-HE COUGHS

-Excuse me.

This is a health care forum, so I thought I'd...

LAUGHTER

..model what happens when you don't get enough sleep.

At his White House launch, Obama hosted supporters

as well as big health care interests,

like the drugs and insurance industries.

He was determined to stop them lining up with the Republicans

against him.

I'm confident if we come together and work together,

we will finally achieve what generations of Americans have

fought for and fulfil the promise of health care in our time.

So, let's get to work. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

The President's health care plan was going to be

the core component of his administration.

And the corporations that I worked for,

the political people that I worked for,

there was no support for it and they wanted to find some way

to defeat it.

There was no way we could support this.

We felt it was a violation of a core principle of the Republican Party.

A significant, massive increase in the size of the Federal Government,

of interference with people's individual choices,

their individual liberty.

Let's find out how these swing voters in Philadelphia

felt about the Republican response

and how Republicans are handling the Obama administration.

Give me a word or phrase to describe what you just saw.

When the Republicans needed a phrase to rally the public,

they turned to wordsmith Frank Luntz and his focus groups.

At one point, a woman raises her hand and she says,

"Frank, this isn't government control of health care,

"this sounds like a government takeover of health care."

The word rings in my head, I look around

and I see everyone going, "Ah."

I see the nodding of the head.

And I knew I had it and you know it, you can feel it.

If you really listen to voters, you get it.

And I remember bursting out in this big-ass smile

cos I wanted them to know -

this is it...

these are the words.

Just because Frank says it's going to work,

doesn't mean it's actually going to work

until you've actually tried it out, but this one clearly hit.

Luntz presented this phrase "government takeover"

to his clients - the Republicans in Congress -

at their weekly private lunch.

This bill is a fiscal Frankenstein.

It's a government takeover.

It's not democratic.

As members started to use it and got a reaction

from their constituents, they, of course, then start telling

their colleagues, "Hey, I used this phrase,

"this is how I'm talking about it.

"This is really working."

The nearly trillion-dollar government takeover

of our health care system.

Luntz's phrase energised Americans

who feared for their place in society.

This was when the Tea Party took off,

fighting what they called "socialism".

-THEY CHANT:

-Kill the bill! Kill the bill!

Socialism is when you take my money and you give it to

other people who don't deserve it cos they never worked for it.

-THEY CHANT:

-USA! USA!

We're in a cultural war and this war is a total war.

The objective of the socialists that are driving the push

for big government is to control all of education,

to control the economy, to control our firearms,

everything.

Nothing is safe from those who think that government

is the solution to every problem.

A lot of us still think that government is one of the

many problems that we need to solve.

Six months after Obama announced his health care reform,

members of Congress broke up for their summer vacations.

They went back to their districts to hold town hall meetings,

usually polite question and answer sessions.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

-THEY CHANT:

-No more ObamaCare!

'Me and members of my staff got kicked and spit on and yelled at

'and used the N word.

'I mean, it was a nasty time.'

The sort of veins popping out of people's neck kind of anger,

I had not seen on our soil in that way.

BOOING

We found that one of the only ways we could, frankly, keep things

from getting totally out of control, was to simply say we're not

going to leave until everyone's had a chance to ask their question.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

If you vote in favour of the national health care,

are you willing to have you and your family

participate in the same plan you'd be voting in for your constituents?

That's a fair question, let me say a couple things about it.

'Night after night, we were doing five, six-hour-long

town hall meetings.

I asked the... I asked you as my Congressman...

With an individual mandate to have health insurance,

I will seriously consider whether to take the public option or not.

HE IS DROWNED OUT BY BOOING

There were dozens of people lined up at the microphone,

kind of screaming and yelling about issues and

"how dare you do this?" and "how dare you do that?"

A woman came to the microphone

and shook her hand at me and said,

"You have to promise me that you will keep government

"out of my Medicare."

The irony of the question is that Medicare is

a 100% government-funded programme. It is a single-payer plan run,

but I promised her that I would indeed do just that.

Thank you all very much.

BOOING

The town hall meetings unnerved Obama's advisors.

They feared that they were losing support in the country

and in Congress.

All right, let's go.

Let's start with legislate, Phil.

Health care is the next three weeks of committee.

'The President felt we had a failure to communicate properly

'on the health care bill'

and any time failures to communicate came up,

I took that very personally because that was my portfolio.

But I was frustrated because he had been told on the front end, by me

and others, that it was going to be very difficult to communicate.

When you give him bad news,

he asks very good questions.

He doesn't react in anger or emotion,

but you could tell he was just sort of weighing all this in his mind

and really thinking about - what do we do next?

For me to say,

"I'm quitting, I'm giving up"

didn't hold a lot of appeal to me, so...

Did I doubt that we might...

..be able to get this done? Absolutely.

I thought that, you know, we're just not going to

be able to navigate all the challenges that are involved here.

He was getting a lot of advice to shift

to a smaller approach on health care,

that the window had closed in getting a comprehensive bill passed.

You could always count on Phil Schiliro to come up with

a solution and it would be always the third way that worked.

And the President said, "Phil, what's that third way?"

And Phil, who's normally a very optimistic person,

kind of looked down and he said, "Well, you know, Mr President,

"unless you're feeling really lucky,

"I'm not sure there is a third way."

And so the President gets up and he walks around the office

and he starts to look out the window - we're kind of wondering,

"What's he doing?" And he said, "Phil, where are we?"

And Phil said, "Sir, we're in the Oval Office."

And he said, "And what's my name?"

And Phil said, "Well, President Barack Obama."

And so the President turned around with this great smile on his face

and he said, "Well, then of course I'm feeling lucky!"

He said, "I'm a black guy named Barack Obama

"and I'm President of the United States, I feel lucky all the time."

The President decided he was still going to go forward

and make the decision we can get across the finish line.

He had to make the case,

so he went before Congress in September, a joint session.

APPLAUSE

CHEERING

Thank you.

I realise that many Americans have grown nervous about reform.

Some of people's concerns have grown out of bogus claims,

spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost.

Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.

Now, my health care proposal

has also been attacked by some who oppose

reform as a government takeover of the entire health care system.

One of the Republicans said something most unusual

and uncharacteristic of the decorum that we usually

have in the House, which I won't repeat.

The reforms I'm proposing

would not apply to those who are here illegally.

-MAN:

-You lie!

GASPING

It's not true.

I gave him my mother-of-five look.

No, I think it was worse than that.

The time for bickering is over.

-APPLAUSE

-The time for games has passed.

Now is the season for action.

The previous attempt to pass a health care law failed

when the White House tried to impose a bill on Congress.

Obama's strategist was not going to let him repeat THAT mistake.

One of the things that seemed very important is not to have

the President put out his own bill.

I thought if he did that, he'd be putting a bill that potentially

could pass the House but not the Senate.

Or it would be able to pass the Senate but not the House.

And so, for this one it made sense to have the bills get developed in

each chamber separately and then try to bring them together at the end.

As the bills made their way through Congress, Obama set out

to sell his vision, as only he could.

You had a young woman who was diagnosed with cancer,

but because she had a case of acne that the insurance company said

hadn't been declared, they decided they wouldn't cover her.

By the time her insurance was reinstated,

her breast cancer had more than doubled in size.

Now, these stories are heartbreaking, they are wrong,

nobody in America should be treated that way,

and we are going to bring about change this year.

CHEERING

I need your voice.

-So I want to know, are you fired up?

-CHEERING

-Ready to go?

-ALL:

-Ready to go!

-Fired up?

-Fired up!

-Ready to go!

-Ready to go!

Let's go change the world. Thank you, everybody.

-THEY CHANT:

-Kill the bill! Kill the bill! Kill the bill!

The mainstream Republican leadership had been wary of the Tea Party,

but now, as the first vote in the House of Representatives approached,

House Republican leader John Boehner courted them.

I'm going to stand with you and all freedom loving Americans

against this bill.

Join us in saying "no" to a government takeover of health care.

Join us in rejecting higher taxes and more deficit.

Join us in defending our freedom.

And join us in defeating Pelosicare.

By a few votes, the health care bill passed in the House.

CHEERING

Now it was the Senate's turn to vote on THEIR bill.

But the Senate Democrats were fighting amongst themselves

about the public option.

This was government-run insurance to compete with the private companies.

The party's right wing feared the public option

was the first step to a national health service.

-Good morning, everybody.

-Good morning, Senator.

Senator Joe Lieberman was at the heart of this group

of conservative Democratic senators.

I thought if the US government

took over health care

or there was a public option

that would be the beginning of,

talk about the camel's nose under the tent,

that it would eventually lead to

an enormous increase in federal spending.

Lieberman could kill the bill.

It took 60 senators to end debate on a bill.

Exactly the number of Democratic votes.

Lieberman's vote was the 60th.

Democratic leaders say you're holding the President hostage.

Oh, goodness, no. I'm here to...

The President told me, "Harry,

"this legislation is more important to me, by far, than my re-election.

"This is going to do something to change America

"and we've got to get this done."

Joe Lieberman caused me a bit of trouble on national TV.

You've got to take out the Medicare buy-in,

you've got to forget about the public option.

'I left the studio, and probably'

five minutes afterwards, in the car going home,

Harry Reid called me and said,

"Can you come to my office this afternoon?"

I said, "Look, I think there's a lot here for the liberal part of

"the Democratic Party to stick with it and nobody can get everything."

It was a bitter pill.

There were many members on the liberal side of the spectrum

anxious to include public options.

But Lieberman's decision closed the door.

There was no public option in the bill

when the senators arrived for the vote on Christmas Eve.

A blizzard had crippled the capital's transport system.

The only danger now for Leader Harry Reid

was that if even one Democrat failed to turn up, the bill couldn't pass.

The Republican senator from Oklahoma said, Senator Byrd was very old,

and the Senator for Oklahoma said

he hoped he'd died during the night so we would be short one vote.

92-year-old Democrat Robert Byrd had been a senator

since before Obama was born.

-Good morning.

-Good morning.

-How do you feel?

-Good.

How do you feel about working on the day before Christmas?

Oh, I do what duty tells me to do.

Mr Byrd.

Mr Reid of Nevada.

'And finally, it's going to pass.

'I vote no.'

LAUGHTER

'For a few seconds I just was so'

engrossed in my thoughts that...

I guess I was so used to voting "no" on stuff it was a surprise to me,

to vote and actually get something done.

Mr Reid of Nevada, aye.

We changed it real quick, yeah.

But it was a little, a little embarrassing.

Later that day, Obama headed off for Christmas with his family.

Now all he needed was for House and Senate Democrats

to agree how to combine their two bills.

I'll be rolling up my sleeves and spending some time

before the full Congress even gets into session.

Because there are a lot of provisions that are both in

the Senate and in the House bill, I actually think that reconciling them

is not going to be as difficult as some people may anticipate.

In the early spring of an election year, the Members of Congress,

their attention naturally turns away from his agenda

on to their own re-election and he knew that, you know,

it's like turning over an hourglass

and the sands are just going down really fast then.

The President decided to do something that was quite unusual.

I don't know if it had ever been done before for a particular

piece of legislation like this.

He held and led several days of meetings in the Cabinet room.

Senate Democrats and House Democrats argued and squabbled

and said they were going to get up and leave.

There was a lot of anger, a lot of emotion.

What we were talking about in my estimation was getting a bill,

and I had to protect my senators and make sure I didn't give up too much.

There were certain things that the senators were just not going to

put in their bill, or that they would have in their bill

that we objected to.

The President was getting a little exasperated, and we all were,

we were all tired of it.

We took a break and went in across the hall to the Oval Office.

He said, "You know, I think I've just about

"done everything I can do here."

And Rahm said, "You know, you're right."

At a certain point, your presence,

they've got to know that you have a price.

It doesn't add anything for you to stay another two hours.

In some sense, they're enjoying debating in front of you.

This debate was about money.

The Senate had a plan to cut costs that the House opposed.

The Chief Of Staff saw a way to break the deadlock.

Obama had to back one side.

I'll make sure they know what the price is.

You don't have to do that.

The President stood up in place and he said, "That's it, I'm finished.

"If we can't get the Democrats to agree on this,

"we don't have a chance,

"and obviously my presence here is not helping.

"As far as I'm concerned, this meeting is over.

"I'm going to bed."

And he walked out of the room, and there was this lull, this pause.

Pelosi started picking up her papers,

Reid started picking up his papers, and at that point

Rahm Emanuel stood up and said, "Stop, we can't leave this way!"

I said, "There will not be a bill with his signature, without it,

"so let's go on to the other items since he's already decided

"what he wants, and his signature is the only way it becomes law."

That was kind of like about 11.50pm.

Rahm is saying, "All right, Henry, you take this, and you take that,

"and does this work, Nance?"

And then that's how we kind of finally got it done

and people agreed - "this works".

As soon as Congress reconvened, the Democrats would pass

this combined bill, and health care would be law.

But then, a Democrat in Boston, Massachusetts,

said something that would undo all their work.

A by-election was underway to fill the Senate seat of Ted Kennedy,

who had died of cancer.

Democrat Martha Coakley was the frontrunner,

until she offended Boston's Red Sox fans.

When asked why all the backroom dealing,

she told the Boston Globe...

You could not think of a...

of a comment more calculated to antagonise people

in the state of Massachusetts.

The President came in, I told him what had happened

and he started leaping up and down, shouting,

"She didn't say that!

"No, she's going to lose! She's going to lose!"

It never crossed my mind that a Republican might win

the special election to replace Senator Kennedy,

it was inconceivable.

This is, after all, the People's Republic Of Massachusetts.

Obama rushed up to campaign, but it was too late.

Oh, my God!

A Republican is going to win this seat and, more importantly,

it's going to give Republicans 41 votes in the Senate,

which is the magic number.

That means we can stop the health care bill in its current form.

He was almost clinical in the way he was looking at it,

asking each person, so, what does this mean?

What does the election mean? What are our options here? How?

Is there a way to still get health reform done?

It was seen not just as a harbinger of doom for the health care law,

but also as a harbinger of doom for the Obama presidency in many ways.

I teared up, and I remember thinking this is terrible

to do this in the Oval Office.

I didn't openly cry but, you know, I was tired anyway, really tired.

I knew that he wasn't giving up, but in my heart I wondered if he should.

It's not expected that the President

and that the incumbent party does well in a mid-term election,

but we were starting to get really worried about what would happen.

My attitude was that we were close enough to the finish line

when we lost that 60th vote in the Senate

that coming up with some creative legislative manoeuvres

was in the realm of possibility.

Once you're halfway up a mountain, a lot of times it's easier to just

keep on going up rather than trying to back your way down.

The only path was going to be to convince the House to pass

the Senate bill, which the House didn't want to do

because it disagreed with parts of the Senate bill,

and I knew that was going to be enormously unpleasant.

Obama rang the Speaker of the House.

The President said, "You just go pass the Senate bill in the House."

I said, "My members won't vote for it. They will not vote for it.

"There are issues, there are provisions in the bill that

"we are not ever going to support, and so we're not doing that."

I knew the odds that day were very low, if the vote were that day,

that the House would pass the Senate bill.

That wasn't the key issue.

The key issue was, with Nancy Pelosi leading the House Democrats,

could they eventually pass the Senate bill?

She had at least as much to lose as I did

because she had upcoming elections,

and she knew that this might be costly,

given how poisonous the atmosphere had become.

Pelosi agreed to try.

One week later, she put Obama's suggestion that they pass

the hated Senate bill to the House Democrats.

Many people got up to the microphone and said that we had to back down.

That the message from the Massachusetts election

was that we should abandon health care reform

and we should, at best, adopt a piecemeal approach.

Many others got up and said that we should power forward

and that the Senate bill wasn't perfect

but that we should continue to move it through.

There was loud, vocal, noisy disagreement

at that first caucus meeting and a lot of people were very scared.

But Pelosi wouldn't give up.

She came up with an ingenious plan that might persuade House Democrats

to save health care.

She would take advantage of a rule that special bills that save

the government money need only 51 votes in the Senate.

We made a list of all the objection...not all,

but a reasonable list of our objections to the Senate bill,

and then we said to the Senate, "We need a letter signed by 51

"Senate Democrats that they will pass these provisions

"when we send them over."

You know, we'll send, we'll pass the Senate bill

and then we'll send these additions over to the Senate,

and we need the 51, the commitment of 51, that they will change.

That's the only way that we're going to have a health care bill

cos we're not passing the Senate bill the way it is.

This was unprecedented,

but Harry Reid promised to get Pelosi her letter.

He'd get 51 senators to sign a pledge that they would

vote for the changes the House wanted.

But he insisted their names would not be revealed.

I just didn't feel it was appropriate, I didn't want,

I didn't want people going around saying, "Did you sign it?

"Did you not sign it?"

I can't recall the exact number,

there were some that were written in a very faint hand.

The letter was never made public.

I just read the letter, respected the word of those members,

told my members, of the Senators,

told my members, I've seen the letter, I'm satisfied.

Many of her members would take more convincing.

Meanwhile, Obama visited the Republicans at their annual retreat.

For a year he had been seeking their cooperation.

The White House suggested that the meeting be broadcast live.

The leaders were walking him in to the event,

almost as if they were security guards.

APPLAUSE

And he's, you know, standing tall, he's got a smile on his face,

he's looking very presidential, straight ahead.

And then there are all the Republican House leaders who were

looking down at their shoes, and you could see on their faces,

"I wish I wasn't here,"

and, "I wish I wasn't escorting this guy into our retreat."

You know what they say, keep your friends close,

but visit the Republican caucus every few months.

LAUGHTER

Frankly, how some of you went after this bill,

you think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot.

'He's very combative, much more than I expected.'

Some of the Republicans were asking not the most effective questions,

and he was batting them away.

No, no, no, no.

Hold on a second, guys.

You know, Mike...

..I've read your legislation.

I mean, I take a look at this stuff.

It can't be all or nothing, one way or the other.

And he starts to complain about the political process and how

poisoned it is, and how partisan it is, and how negative it is.

Unfortunately that's how our politics works right now.

That's how a lot of our discussion works.

'And he looks at me and he gets this smile on his face,

'and I'm looking at him, assuming he's looking

'three tables behind me.'

..all the talking points.

I see Frank Luntz up here, sitting in the front.

He's already polled it, and he's said, you know,

"The way you're really going to... I've done a focus group, and the

"way we're really going to box in Obama on this one or make Pelosi

"look bad on that one..."

I know, I like Frank, we've had conversations...

between Frank and I, but that's how we operate.

It's all tactics, and it's not solving problems.

Now, understand that when

the President of the United States, I don't care who he is,

calls out your name, the first thing you try not to do is faint.

I don't want to sound like some kind of weak-kneed guy,

but I wasn't expecting it. But he doesn't leave me alone.

He's like, "There's Frank Luntz and he's got his computer

"and he's taking notes."

And he was kind of telling the truth.

I had been taking notes that I was going to present to them

that afternoon in how to respond to the President.

Thank you, everybody.

God bless the United States of America.

Even if Obama didn't convince a single Republican,

218 House Democrats would be enough to pass health care.

The President and Phil Schiliro had their work cut out.

We didn't have 218, we were in the low 200s -

205, 208, depending on the day.

Phil carried around a card that he kept inside his breast pocket

of his jacket, sort of like a forced ranking from the

least likely to support down to the most likely.

The ones at the top were the ones that we needed to work on,

and every morning we would sit and go through that list.

Top of the list was Congressman Bart Stupak.

Stupak led a coalition of Democrats who were against abortion.

So I really have a dilemma.

One principle, I want to see health care pass,

45,000 Americans die - one every 12 minutes -

because they don't have health care,

and over here I don't want to have federal funding

paying for abortions so young children cannot be born.

Obama wanted to keep abortion out of the debate,

but Stupak had enough allies in the party to kill the bill.

And the Republicans were happy to join him.

They were almost all anti-abortion. Pro-life.

I'm from what you might call a big family,

I've got 11 brothers and sisters.

CHEERING

I'm sure it wasn't easy for our mother to have 12 of us,

but I'm glad we're all here.

CHEERING

Stupak had written an amendment to guarantee that government money

could not pay for abortions. Effectively, this would also stop

private insurance companies from selling abortion coverage.

They would have prohibited women from paying with their own funds,

in addition to preventing federal funds from being used.

That, we could not allow to happen.

No-one was willing to talk to me or move this legislation along,

and my little coalition was saying, we're not voting for it

unless we get an opportunity to vote on life issues.

-How close were you to a deal again?

-Getting there, getting there.

-God bless you!

-We love you, Congressman Stupak.

We're praying for you. Stand for life, sir.

We would not be able to get to 218 unless we can pick that lock

and figure out how to solve it and accommodate their concerns

and then the concerns of people on the other side.

I'd like now to introduce Sister Keehan or, as we say,

Yester, it's your podium.

The White House turned to a powerful ally within the Catholic Church

to help them remove abortion from the health care debate.

Sister Carol Keehan was CEO of the Catholic Health Association,

the largest non-profit provider of health care in the US.

'She and I talked quite a bit about it and I suggested'

that the President call her and he did, and she was convinced.

They had a good rapport and trust,

and she was convinced that

President Obama had no intention of covering abortion.

The President had said, at the joint session of Congress,

there will not be federal funding of abortion in the bill,

so even the pro-abortion people

knew they weren't going to get federal funding of abortion.

But Obama's words were not enough

for the Conference of Catholic Bishops,

who had been working closely with Stupak over his amendment.

Sister Carol went to Chicago to meet the head of the bishops,

Cardinal Francis George.

She hoped to persuade him to believe the President

and issue a joint letter that united the Catholic Church behind the bill.

Well, I went to his home, spent two hours with him.

We walked through all the pieces of the bill, all the concerns,

all the potential for being double-crossed,

the various discussions that we'd had with the White House

and with the Members of Congress.

This was a way to help the poor, that was what she saw,

and I can see why she saw that,

but she was of the opinion that we could take care of everything else

after it was passed again.

And we were saying that would be too late

and we must stay together on this.

I faxed him a letter at his office and at his home,

saying, "Time is running out, we either go on record together

"or we're going to lose the opportunity

"to push this bill over the line."

And I didn't get that to her in time - I did delay.

With just a few days left before the vote, Sister Carol had to decide

whether to go it alone.

If she did, she would expose a rift in the Church.

I was doing my little column that I do every two weeks.

For many people, it'd just be seen as a dinky little newspaper

that goes to our members.

I said, "Now is the time to get the job done,

"we need to get this bill passed."

I didn't think it would amount to a hill of beans.

Catholic nuns are breaking from their bishops

and supporting the health care bill.

By Friday evening I was getting calls from everybody.

Who would you bet on in a fight, if the fight is between

Congressman Bart Stupak on one side

and 59,000 nuns on the other side?

Say it with me now, 59,000 nuns...

sent a letter to House lawmakers today,

urging them to pass the Senate health reform bill.

What do you make of the large organisation of religious orders,

of religious nuns, what do you make of them

coming out for the bill as it's written?

Well, with all due respect to the nuns, when I deal, or when we're

working on right-to-life issues, we don't call the nuns. I mean...

When they asked me about it, they did catch me by surprise.

The media told me about it.

Why are the bishops more reliable than the nuns?

Well, because I don't think I've ever been in...

In my 18 years, I don't think I ever have been contacted

by the nuns on legislation. You know, seldom do you see it,

they're not considered one of the groups

that's actively involved up here on issues.

They may surface, they may write a letter,

but they're not up here talking with members, and they're

not the recognised spokesperson for the Catholic Church.

I met with certain members of Congress who were pro-life,

and who had the same concerns we had, and it really wasn't

so much an attempt to persuade,

as to explain how we got to where we were.

People who actually understand how the health care system works,

like Sister Carol, and understood how the bill worked,

ended up just having a lot more knowledge of reality.

She brought the CHA into a position where publicly

they were opposed to the bishops.

That's an extraordinary thing for somebody that calls themselves

Catholic to do, and so it also threatened

the unity of the Church, as well as influenced public policy.

The bishops either didn't understand the bill or were trying to do

something other than... You know, just wanted to stop the bill,

so we were never going to find common ground with them.

With the bishops. But the nuns, thank God for the nuns.

Stupak's anti-abortion coalition had shrunk to six.

If the White House could win them over,

Obama would have the 218 votes he needed.

He had one more weapon,

he could issue an executive order, a presidential

decree that guaranteed abortion rules were not going to change.

We knew if we put it out there too soon,

the idea of the executive order from the President,

that the opposition would form around it

and there would be something wrong with it,

and on the other side, the women members would get more upset

and it just wouldn't work,

so it was on purpose a last-minute effort to resolve

everyone's concerns and it had to be timed just exactly right.

Well, on this beautiful morning, we are here to mark the passage

of a welcome piece of legislation for our fellow Americans

who are seeking work in this difficult economy.

Obama chose his moment carefully.

Three days before the health care vote,

he invited Congressman Stupak to the signing of a jobs bill.

They have the bill signing ceremony,

the President gets up, goes to the front row,

shakes all the sponsors' hands.

He sees me, he reaches across, "Hey, Bart!" "Hello, Mr President."

And he says, you know, "We got to talk."

I said, "Just give me my amendment, we'll get this bill done."

He said, "That ain't going to happen."

I said, "Then we probably don't have a bill, Mr President."

He said, "We'll talk."

Then they say, "Hey, Rahm wants to talk to you."

So, I said, "Bart, what if we did the executive order?

"We'd meet your objectives and allow you a path toward the President's."

At the end of the day he said, you know, there's two couches that

face each other, coffee table and a fireplace, and the Chief Of Staff.

We sat across and worked out... I mean, two non-lawyers,

we worked out the language around the executive order

and I had the lawyers work with his team and draft it.

Stupak agreed.

As they finalised the executive order, Cardinal George phoned.

The conversation with Stupak was to encourage him, to ask him to be sure

to hold fast along with the very few pro-life Democrats that he had.

If I do what Cardinal George wanted, in other words,

at the end what he was encouraging me to do

was to vote totally against health care

because it did not have the Stupak amendment in there.

Now, if I stick my head in the sand and say,

"You will not get my vote, or the vote of my little coalition

"unless I get what I want," and they don't give it to me,

and the whole bill goes down, what do I have?

I have nothing, I have no health care,

I have no protections for life.

Obama had hoped to pass health care in six months.

Now, a year after he started, they were going to the final vote.

-How's it going, guys?

-Are you going to get the votes, sir?

We are going to get this done.

Every vote's going to count because, when it's all said and done,

this is going to be a very, very close vote.

You used the word Armageddon, what did you mean by that?

This health care bill will ruin our country.

It's time to stop them. Got to vote.

CHEERING

-THEY CHANT:

-Kill the bill! Kill the bill! Kill the bill! Kill the bill!

Madam Speaker, are you ready to announce the verdict? 216.

Do you have 216, Madam Speaker?

A lot of us were in the Roosevelt Room, watching it.

Rahm and I had a side bet about a couple of members,

whether we'd get them or not.

On this vote, the yeas are 220,

the nays are 211.

The bill is passed.

It was one of those moments that you...

that reminds you of why you got into politics in the first place.

When we work in government, every day is history.

Whatever the bill is, that becomes part of history.

I think of it as little history and big history,

and that night, as we were passing health care reform,

that was big history.

I had a bunch of my staff up here to the White House residence

and we went up on the Truman Balcony and toasted

all these 25-year-olds and, you know,

a bunch of people who had worked so hard.

Michelle and his daughters were away at the time so the guys

had the run of the apartment and decided to have a frat house party.

It was a very casual party. One of my favourite pictures,

and I'm sure the President probably didn't put this one out,

but he's holding a martini - probably why he didn't put it out -

but just the smile on his face is just, you can tell

it was just the best moment of his life.

Other than his marriage, I don't know that I've ever seen him quite

that happy, and so I asked him, in the wee hours of the morning,

how he felt that night, compared to election night.

The most gratifying moment that I've had in public life.

More than my election as President, because you run

and hopefully win elected office,

not just for the sake of being something,

but for the sake of doing something.

He was calling around to thank people that had tried to be helpful.

Very gracious of him.

I was in Paris and I inadvertently

let the President of the United States' call go to my voicemail.

You know, you listen to your voice messages and it's the

President of the United States and you think,

"Oh, Lord, what did I do?"

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

At the signing ceremony,

Obama's Vice President couldn't contain himself.

Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

I felt numb.

It was... It was...

By then, I was starting to understand

how...

hard this was going to be for the President,

having achieved something of this landmark nature,

that it was very polarising too.

# O, say, can you see

# By the dawn's early... #

Even now, Obama's opponents refused to accept defeat.

The only way to repeal ObamaCare

would be to take control of Congress.

Tea Party activists, who started by attending rallies,

now stood as candidates in the approaching mid-term elections.

Hi, this is Governor Sarah Palin,

I'm urging you to vote Renee Ellmers for Congress.

Renee will vote to repeal ObamaCare.

I'm not a politician, I became a candidate because, as a nurse,

I'm concerned about what the Obama administration

and Bob Etheridge were doing to our health care system.

He'll work to repeal ObamaCare, cut spending

and slash the deficit.

Labrador will stand up to Obama and Pelosi.

Up the revolution!

Up the Tea Party!

Ladies and gentlemen, Sarah Palin!

We must not fundamentally transform America as some would want.

We must restore America and restore her honour.

CHEERING

# And the home of the brave. #

During the mid-term campaign, Sarah Palin posted a map of the US,

with crosshairs over the districts of vulnerable Democrats

who had voted for health care.

One was Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list,

but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has

the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district,

and when people do that they've got to realise

there's consequences to that action.

Another congressman targeted by Palin was Tom Perriello.

Make sure you get out and vote on Tuesday for one of the best

congressmen Virginia's ever had, Tom Perriello.

Loyal Democrats were vulnerable.

Unemployment was high

and ObamaCare wouldn't be fully implemented for years.

There were members who came up to me after we all lost and said,

"Well, if I'd known that we were all going to lose

"I would've voted more like you."

I wanted to vote for what I thought was right

and losing an election is just not the end of the world.

We have a big story to report tonight. At the top of this hour,

NBC news is projecting that Republicans have won control

of the House of Representatives.

Further, we are projecting that...

Obama's only consolation was that the Republicans hadn't won

enough Senate seats to repeal health care.

But he had suffered a devastating defeat in the House.

He had lost more seats than any president since 1938,

and the Tea Party now had 60 Republican members.

There were a lot of individual Members of Congress who ended up

voting for this bill and losing their seats, in part because

they were characterised as having supported ObamaCare.

The next day on Capitol Hill,

it looked like a neutron bomb went off.

Nobody spoke.

People were walking down the halls like, "Wow, she lost."

"Hey, he's gone."

Who do you think's going to get her office?

Everyone...

It was total shock.

Barack Obama was supposed to have changed America as we know it.

Because the process was so messy,

you know, the legislation wasn't as elegant as you would have liked.

Even if it's not perfect, then over time

we'll be able to look back 20 years from now

and I think feel great satisfaction about what we accomplished.

I now pass this gavel, which is larger than most gavels here,

but the gavel of choice of Mr Speaker Boehner,

I now pass this...

LAUGHTER

..I now pass this gavel

and the sacred trust that goes with it to the new Speaker.

-God bless you, Speaker Boehner.

-CHEERING

Three days later, Gabby Giffords was shot in the head

at her town hall meeting and lost the power of speech.

Six others were killed.

For the remainder of his presidency,

Obama would not regain a majority in Congress.

The Republicans would block all his other major reforms.

They'd make over 60 attempts to repeal ObamaCare.

In next week's programme, how Obama went to war...

I turned to the President and said, "Can I just finish the two wars

"that I'm already in before you go looking for a third one?"

..and launched a secret bid to prevent conflict with Iran.

The President took us aside and said he trusted us

and basically, don't screw it up.