GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

GLENN: Secretary Leavitt is on the phone with us now. Secretary, how are you, sir?

LEAVITT: Good morning to you. I'm well.

GLENN: Very good. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about SCHIPS. If you can just run down for anybody who might be listening right now that they don't understand what we're talking about when we're talking about expanding this program.

Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

LEAVITT: Well, in our country we want people who are elderly, disabled or low income to have help getting insurance, and a big part of that has been the children's, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It has to be reauthorized. It has been a very important program that will help children who are in families that have low incomes -- that's under 2% -- get health insurance and now it needs to be reauthorized so the Democrats are proposing that we change from where it is now at 200%, which is about $40,000 a year, to some being covered as much as $83,000 a year. What that would mean is that we would be to many families, as many as 1.5 million people, we would be having them cancel private insurance so that we can move them to free government insurance. And that's not progress.

GLENN: You know, a lot of bloggers ripped apart this kid, Graham Frost who was the voice of the Democratic response. He's 12 and he's on SCHIPS and he said, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for SCHIPS. And a lot of people tore this family apart because their houses appreciated over 400,000 -- or I'm sorry, 400% since they bought it, the family makes about $50,000 a year. It's not the kid's fault and it's not the family's fault. It's the Government's fault for allowing that person to be covered. That is not somebody who's living on the poverty line. Who are we saying we should cover? Who is the President saying we should cover?

LEAVITT: We should cover poor children and poor children has been defined in the past as being those who are making 200% of the poverty line. Now, for a family of four, that's about $42,000. The bill the President vetoed would increase for some as high as $83,000. Now, just to give you some perspective on that, there's a tax in America called the AMT tax, the alternative minimum tax. It's a rich person's tax and it was set up to make sure that people who have higher than average incomes pay their share. Many of the people who would qualify under the bill the President will veto would have -- would be qualified to pay both the AMT tax, the rich person's tax, and at the same time get public subsidy for their health insurance. Only in Washington can you be rich and poor at the same time.

GLENN: Secretary, this is nothing more than a move toward socialized medicine. You know it, I know it. Every right-thinking American knows it. What is it going to take? I mean, I have to tell you, I understand the spirit of compromise in Washington but I've come to a place in my life where I'm not going to compromise on two things. I am not going to compromise on socialism and I am not going to compromise with evil, and we are facing both of those things in our country. The President says he wants to compromise. Please explain to me why we should compromise and raise this at all.

LEAVITT: Well, what the President has said is he wants to reauthorize it just the way it is. The Democrats say it will take more money than is in the President's budget to cover all of the children who are currently eligible and the President says --

GLENN: Do you believe that to be true?

LEAVITT: He has said, look, there are two problems here: There is the policy who should be covered and then there's the arithmetic problem, how much it's going to cost. Let's agree on the policy and keep it the way it is and then we'll work on that. We can compromise on the arithmetic and get the number right. If you don't think I've got it right, we'll work on that.

GLENN: That's fair.

LEAVITT: The bottom line is we want to reauthorize the program. We want to cover poor children first. We want to cover poor children before adults. We want to cover poor children before middle income families who have insurance that would be cancelling it so that they can go on free government insurance.

GLENN: You have a system that Romney put in place up in Boston where, you know, he's covering all of these families. You still have a good percentage of people that are qualified for the free healthcare and still won't take it.

LEAVITT: There are somewhere between 5 and 800,000 depending on whose number you use. Children who are below the level of poverty now who don't have insurance. Those are the people that we ought to be seeking out and helping enroll in this program. They need health insurance. Now, I've been governor for many years in the past and I know it's hard sometimes to find them and it's a lot easier for a governor to go out and say let's take our limited amount of money and go to somebody who's making $70,000, $80,000 a year and persuade them to cancel their private insurance so we can give them free government insurance and then we can take credit for having increased the number of children who have insurance. That isn't progress. Progress is when we help any American get insurance but particularly poor children.

GLENN: Mr. Secretary, I think the American people feel very frustrated because I really, truly believe that many of us feel our country's being hijacked. And it's being hijacked and we don't know what the truth is anymore. We don't know who to believe anymore. We've trusted so many Republicans and Republicans turned out to be just as big a spenders as any Democrat could possibly ever imagine and so we don't know what to do. All we know is we don't believe in socialism. We don't believe in big government programs. I can't name the thing that the Government does better than the private sector. How do we get involved to stop this and know that it's not going to be jammed down our throat anyway in the middle of the night?

LEAVITT: Well, this is a very important crossroads in healthcare which, by the way, is the biggest, one of the most significant segments of our economy, and it's very clear that the Democrats have a vision of every person being covered by federal insurance. They want us to have the government make healthcare choices, what the plan should look like, they want the Government to decide what the prices should be, they want government to decide who gets care when, they want the Government to pay for it raising taxes and that's one vision. The other vision is for a government that organization a health insurance system where everyone has access to an affordable choice of plans, that consumers make choices, that the innovation is allowed to work. Now, this is an important crossroads because what the Democrat bill would do that the President vetoed is that it would move over a million people who are currently privately insured to free government insurance.

GLENN: Mr. Secretary, I hate to cut you off but I'm up against a hard network break. I appreciate your time, sir, and your hard work and thank you for explaining this. It is coming soon, gang. Pay attention.

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