Obama, Face The Nation Transcript (9-20-09)

Read the complete transcript. Excerpt below:

Schieffer: You have made speeches, you've addressed the joint session of Congress, you've done interviews, but the polling continues to show that people are still skeptical about your health reform plans.

Orrin Hatch, the Republican Senator from Utah, has done a lot of work on health care over the years, summed it up this way - these are his words: "If anyone believes that Washington can do a plan that will cost close to a trillion dollars, cover all Americans, not raise taxes on anyone, not increase the deficit, not reduce benefits or choices for our families and seniors, then I have a bridge to sell you."

Have you promised too much, Mr. President?

Obama: No I don't think I've promised too much at all. Look - first of all, everybody acknowledges this is a problem. Everybody acknowledges that the current path we're on is unsustainable. Not just for people who don't have health insurance, but for those who do.

We just had a study come out this week showing that premiums for families went up 130 percent over the last decade. Those costs probably went up even higher for the average employer and that's part of the reason why you're seeing each successive year fewer Americans having health insurance from their employers than they previously did.

Health care inflation went up 5.5 percent this past year when inflation was actually negative because of this extraordinary recession. So we know that standing still is not an option.

Now what I've said is we can make sure that people who don't have health insurance can buy into an insurance pool that gives them better bargaining power. For people who have health insurance we can provide health insurance reforms that make the insurance they have more secure. And we can do that mostly by using money that every expert agrees is being wasted and is currently in the existing health care system. So -- in fact what we've got right now is about 80 percent consensus on how we would accomplish that.

Now let me be honest: With a piece of legislation this complicated and a sector of the economy that's about one-sixth of our economy there's a reason why for the last 40 years people have been talking about this and it hasn't gotten done &30151; it's hard. And there are a lot of moving parts. And so I appreciate fact that the American people are really cautious about this because it's important to them and the majority of people still have health insurance. What I'm trying to do is to explain the facts, which are if we don't do anything a lot of Americans are gonna be much worse off and over time the federal budget just can't sustain it.