Healthcare reform was a key discussion point on this week’s Meet The Press.

Below are relevant excerpts from the conversation. Host David Gregory was joined by the president’s chief economic adviser, the director of the National Economic Council, Dr. Larry Summers, the authors of the just-published book, “The Battle For America 2008,” Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, and two former congressmen, Democrat Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee, and Republican J.C. Watts of Oklahoma.

The full video can be found here and the full transcript here.

DR. SUMMERS: The long-term deficit’s a central problem. That’s why we need to reform health care. We need to reform health care in terms of the ways in which we reimburse for Medicare. We need to reform health care in terms of the ways in which we encourage preventive care, the ways in which we do research to assure that people get the care they need, but you don’t have the kind of care situation where people are getting three times the rate of some type of surgery in one city as they are.

That’s why the president has made health care a central issue in long-term deficit reduction. It’s going to be the largest part of the federal, the federal budget. It’s the thing that’s most important for business’s competitiveness and for workers’ take-home pay. So we’re going right at the deficit, but we’re going at the issue that’s measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, federal dollars, which is federal health care spending. And that’s the big fight the president’s committed to.

There are some measures, for example, providing over five years for computerized medical records at a time when the average supermarket has more information technology in it than the average doctor’s office. No, the president’s not going to think about repealing that.

MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you a couple of questions about health care. The difficulty of deadlines being missed and more public opposition to health care leads to the question of whether or not the president is losing the economic argument, that is the argument that health care is essential as an economic fix.

The president's top economic adviser, director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers

DR. SUMMERS: It is essential as an economic fix. It’s essential because of how much of the federal budget health care represents. It’s essential because it’s so important for the competitiveness of American businesses. You know, for some of the automobile companies, the health insurance companies are actually their largest supplier. And it’s essential to slow the growth of health costs if American families are going to see rising wages that rise ahead of inflation. So it is essential.

MR. GREGORY: But is the president losing that argument?

DR. SUMMERS: There have now been healthcare bills voted out of four congressional committees. That is four more congressional committees than have voted, that have voted comprehensive healthcare legislation in the last, in the last generation. Yes, it’s going to take time to work out, to work out the argument. Yes, there are continuing controversies, as there should be. But let’s not forget that we are closer to comprehensive healthcare reform than this country has ever been.

Let’s not forget how we’re doing it. We passed tax cuts at the beginning of this decade. We passed a prescription drug benefit at the beginning of this decade. Nobody even thought about the question of how they were going to be paid for. Nobody set an aspiration of doing it in a balanced-budget way.

Yes, we’re having a lot of arguments about how best to do it in a balanced-budget way, and there’s tension in those arguments. But how much better it is to be doing these things this way, the way this president is doing it, by insisting on the pay for, by insisting that it be done in a balanced-budget framework…

MR. GREGORY: Well, let’s talk about that point.

DR. SUMMERS: …even recognizing that’s going to lead to some arguments.

MR. GREGORY: That’s a very important point, and yet the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has looked at this, a nonpartisan actor in this debate, and has said there is a shortfall in paying for it even over the first decade, and that shortfall grows in subsequent decades. As you look at these healthcare plans, do there have to be fundamental changes if you’re going to avoid adding to the deficit down the line?

DR. SUMMERS: CBO said that about one of the bills that’s passed, one of the committees. This is why the discussions are continuing. No bill is going to move forward that is not over the first 10 years scored by the CBO as budget neutral.

But the president’s, in addition to insisting on budget neutrality, which we didn’t use to do, the president’s doing another important thing. It’s what we’ve called a belt and suspenders approach.

There’s some things–how we pay drug companies, for example–where you can do the accounting very accurately and you can see what happens to the deficit. There are other things–encouraging prevent, encouraging preventive care, taking the whole reimbursement system out of politics–where it’s much more difficult to do the exact calculation.

And so the CBO doesn’t give us any credit for them even though most people would say that, over time, they’re likely to have some benefit. And so we’re doing both sets of things. And so I think we’ve got a lot of basis for being optimistic that, whatever the CBO says, it’s going to end up better. But we’re being very conservative. That’s why it’s belt and suspenders. We’re not taking any account of that second set of changes, the preventive care and all of that.

This is the most fiscally responsible approach to introducing a major structural change in the economy that’s ever been pursued. If you look at what happened with Medicare, if you look at what happened with prescription drugs, if you look at what happened when food stamps was introduced, there has never been this degree of careful scrutiny of long-run, long, long-run cost impacts. And it’s right because the center of this has to be containing healthcare costs, otherwise it’s not going to work for most families.

MR. GREGORY: Congressman Ford, are we making real progress here? You talk about health care, it’s becoming less popular in the public’s eyes. And look at this from our poll, handling of health care in terms of job approval overall, president is at 41 percent in July of ’09. Look where Bill Clinton was at, 43 percent in June of 1994. That’s not a place where the White House wants to be on health care.

FMR. REP. FORD: Probably not.

But the president made clear from the outset of this debate about health care, he wanted to accomplish three things: one, expand coverage; two, control costs; and, three, pay for it.

And you have to applaud him for that. Remember, when we passed the prescription drug package–J.C. and I remember this, in Congress several years ago–we didn’t pay for it. We’ve added–we added to the deficit going forward. So whatever you want to debate and however you want to criticize this president, he is paying for it.

Former Congressman Democrat Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee

August is critical, the war room in the White House which is generating ideas and responses to the Republicans, who, frankly, have created a war room not to generate new ideas but to generate a way to kill this bill. It’s my hope that the president will take seriously what the Blue Dogs have put forward. I was a Blue Dog member in the Congress. I think their efforts have been constructive. They’ve allowed principal reform to come forward, they’ve allowed us to confront the challenges facing everyday Americans, small businesses across the country. And it’s my hope that a public health option is included in the final package, that we get closer to Max Baucus’ bill.

Remember, the CBO , the impartial, nonpartisan group, has said that Max Baucus’ $900 billion healthcare bill will actually lower, lower deficit costs starting in 2019, will expand coverage and achieve the goals of this president. If we’re able to get that message out as a party over the next month, we will have a healthcare bill. If not, the Republicans will succeed not in generating a new idea, an alternative, but in actually killing a healthcare reform package, which I think will hurt Republicans in the long term.

FMR. REP. FORD: We can’t get around the fact that what he–what Obama’s trying to do with this health reform package is realign financial incentives to actual outcomes in hospitals and doctors offices. We can’t get around the fact that insurance companies deny coverage to people who have pre-existing conditions, that they cut families off from their coverage when they face an illness, let alone a catastrophic illness. That’s what this bill is trying to correct.

I think the–that the points that J.C. raises are ones that should be addressed, but we should not kill a healthcare reform package because the arguments that you’re making, which have been around forever, cannot be addressed. I think they can be addressed and should be addressed.

MR. JOHNSON: Every president since Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, tried…

FMR. REP. WATTS: You have a little more perspective on that than me.

MR. JOHNSON: Yeah. I was there when Lincoln, I mean, you know? But it really, if you look, they all tried to get universal health care. Roosevelt got Social Security because he couldn’t get universal health care. And it took Lyndon Johnson, finally, after Vietnam, the tragedies, the riots, the assassinations, to get Medicare. And now the role is, people talk about Medicare, that’s “Keep your hands off my Medicare. I don’t want the government involved in Medicare.” It’s a government-run program.

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